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AMEEICAN TRAITS 

FEOM THE POINT OF VIEW 
OF A GERMAN 



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BY 



HUGO MtJNSTERBERG 



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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1902 






COPYRIGHT, I90I, BY HUGO MUNSTERBERG 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published November, igot 



To 
FKEDERICK WILLIAM HOLLS 

Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague 

ideal type of the 

American of German Descent 



PREFACE 

The following essays are not scholarly studies, 
but light sketches drawn in leisure hours by a 
German who has pitched his tent among the 
Americans and become interested in the differ- 
ences between the Americans and the Germans. 
But my interest in that contrast is not merely a 
theoretical one : I believe* that these two nations 
can and ought to learn from each other, and that 
in this case even the protectionists of national 
civilization ought not to favor a prohibitive tariff 
on foreign ideals. Such mutual instruction has 
been hindered by prejudices and misunderstand- 
ings : the two nations do not know each other 
sufficiently, although they are connected by in- 
numerable ties from the past and will need each 
other's good will still more in the years to come. 
To root out such prejudices and to facilitate mu- 
tual benefit, it becomes a duty to measure critically 
the culture of the one country by the ideals of 
the other. 



vi PREFACE 

In this small volume the topic is discussed only 
from one side, for this book is written for Amer- 
icans, and for Americans only. The problem is, 
therefore, not what Germany ought to learn from 
the United States, but rather, how far a fuller 
understanding of German ideals can be service- 
able to American culture. Of course this point 
of view has limited from the beginning the circle 
of problems to demand consideration ; thus it has 
not been necessary to speak of commerce and in- 
dustry and a hundred other topics with regard to 
which Germans and Americans might be com- 
pared. And the choice of subjects has been fur- 
ther influenced by factors in the life of the author. 
Schoolboy, student, and later university professor 
in Germany, and now for seven years a professor 
in America, I have been of course more closely in 
contact with certain sides of civilization than with 
others ; it is thus natural that the problems of 
education and scholarship take somewhat the cen- 
tral place in my discussions. Even the special 
seat of observation must have had its influence on 
my impressions : I was hardly surprised to read 
the other day that I see the American world 



PREFACE vii 

through German eyes with Harvard astigma- 
tism. 

That I see it with German eyes is certainly 
true : it is the only reason which gives, perhaps, 
to these small sketches a right to exist ; if I saw 
America with the eyes of an American I should 
hardly hope to notice features which possibly my 
neighbors overlook. It is the contrast which 
brings out the lines, and that fact alone excuses 
my speaking to Americans on American subjects 
after so short a period of acquaintance; had I 
waited longer I should have seen my surroundings 
more nearly with American eyes and should have 
perceived less the characteristic differences. I 
think I can say at least that I have made the best 
use of these years of American life to come in 
contact with its infinite variety. While the Har- 
vard life in Boston offers in itself a good oppor- 
tunity to meet men and to feel the pulse of 
American civiHzation, I have traveled again and 
again over the country and have tried to experi- 
ence the national life in all its important or char- 
acteristic phases. 

These informal pages, of course, cannot show 



Tiii PREFACE 

wholly what American life has meant to me, inas- 
much as my topic forces me to the side of the op- 
position. If it is my aim to point to those features 
of American life on which a comment in the Hght 
of European ideals seems allowable, the picture 
which I draw must appear one-sided, as the task 
gives me no chance to linger on the superiorities 
of American culture which do not need the re- 
touching by foreign ideals. I am thus obliged to 
put in all the shadows and to brush out the lights ; 
therefore no one ought to imagine that it has 
been my intention to draw a complete picture of 
American life as it appears to me. 

This preponderance of adverse criticism brings 
an unavoidable result : I must express opinions 
which are antagonistic to widely favored opinions 
of the day, to pet theories, and to flourishing 
customs. I have already experienced the conse- 
quences. All the five essays have appeared pre- 
viously, the first three in the " Atlantic Monthly,'' 
the last two in the " International Monthly," — 
I reprint them with the kind permission of the 
magazines, — and their isolated appearance has 
every time given rise to a public discussion of 



PREFACE ix 

unexpected vehemence. Especially the paper on 
education, which I had pubhshed under the 
title of '' School Reform/' brought forward ever 
new rejoinders which often indicated that I had 
touched a sore point. I have finally decided 
nevertheless to reprint all the papers with but 
slight alterations ; I felt that my papers would 
become valueless if I ever shaded them for the 
purpose of escaping antagonism. And further, if 
I look backward I cannot forget how much larger 
was the number of those who encouraged me to 
stand for my side of the case, and who insisted 
that it was the right time to raise a voice against 
the tendencies of the day. 

Only one criticism has appeared in those utter- 
ances which seems to have weight, or at least seems 
certainly to be in order. It has been often ques- 
tioned whether I am right in fighting merely 
against American shortcomings from a German 
point of view, and in trying to destroy prejudices 
on this side of the water ; whether it is not in a 
still higher degree my duty to attempt the same 
for the other side; for German prejudices con- 
cerning the United States are certainly not less 



X PREFACE 

severe and the points in which Germany might 
learn from American culture not less numerous. 
The question is fair, and I should acknowledge its 
force had only my critics first made sure that I 
am not doing exactly what they urge. I have 
done it unceasingly and with my best energies 
ever since I came here : I have published on the 
other side scores of articles and essays, and shall 
soon put before the German public an entire 
book on American life, a book which is far less 
fragmentary than this, and deals in a detailed 
way with the political, economic, intellectual, and 
social aspects of American culture. Its purpose 
is to illuminate and to defend a culture which I 
have learned to admire and which is so greatly 
misunderstood over there ; it seeks to interpret 
systematically the democratic ideals of America. 
It will be written for Germans only. 

I know this method of double entry exposes 
me to the possibiHty, when detached paragraphs 
of my German essays are brought over here and 
published in translation, of seeming inconsistent 
or even insincere. And yet contradictions exist 
merely for the superficial observer; both state- 



PREFACE xi 

ments express equally a sincere conviction. A 
little strip of gray paper appears white on a black 
background and black on a white one; so my 
statements can express the same truth on both 
sides only if the peculiarities of pubhc opinion 
they encounter are considered beforehand. What 
I write in Germany to counteract the prejudices 
against America would sound on American soil 
like cheap flattery, and would be not only useless, 
but would stand in the way of reform ; on the 
other hand, that which I publish here would 
sound there like utter condemnation, it would 
reinforce unfriendly opinions, and would be in 
fact misleading, since it would be exaggerated by 
the existing prejudices and would not be supple- 
mented by a knowledge of the really salient high 
lights. The wrong would thus be done not by 
the author who emphasizes the good points of 
America over there, and criticises the weak ones 
here, but by those who detach such studies from 
their background. 

My last word is, therefore, a serious request 
that no one, especially no German- American who 
agrees with me as to the need of good relations 



xii PREFACE 

between the two countries, should quote or trans- 
late from this little book in a German paper over 
in the fatherland. So far as I can help it, no copy 
of the book shall reach the European continent ; 
and I can promise in return also to take pains 
when I publish my German book on America 
that none of the amiabilities I may have to pro- 
mulgate over there shall recross the ocean and 

dull my criticism here. 

HUGO MUNSTERBERG. 
Cambridge, Mass., October, 1901. 



CONTENTS 



Page 
I. THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS .... 1 

II. EDUCATION 43 

III. SCHOLARSHIP 81 

IV. WOMEN 128 

V. AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 173 



AMERICAN TRAITS 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 

I 

During the last years, and especially since the 
beginning of the Spanish war, scarcely a month 
has passed which has not brought to public no- 
tice some fancied friction between the Americans 
and the Germans, and again and again the scare- 
heads of sensational newspapers have suggested 
the possibiHty of a clash. Since England is no 
longer a bogy to frighten the Americans, the 
Germans have to be the target of all the suspi- 
cion and bad feeling which some Americans like 
to cultivate against Europe, a feeling always en- 
couraged by those politicians who want to bolster 
up new schemes by vague allusions to a threat- 
ening danger beyond the sea. Whether Captain 
Coghlan or an agrarian in the fatherland has 
talked inconsiderately, whether Dewey and Die- 
drichs or Chaffee and Waldersee are the actors, 
whether Samoa or China, the West Indies or Bra- 



2 AMERICAN TRAITS 

zil is in question^ whether meat inspection and 
the importation of American apples or a tariff 
change on this side is under discussion, whether in 
Congress or the Reichstag the industrial develop- 
ment of the future is forecast, the facts are each 
time pointed out to us as dangerous clouds whose 
Hghtnings may strike us before the next news- 
paper edition. All this, however, is politics ; 
whether serious conflicts were really impending or 
not, why should a student of social psychology 
concern himself with the situation ? 

But may we not be deceiving ourselves if we 
think that the real trouble has been in Manila or 
Apia or Pekin, or that it will ever take its rise in 
the market places of the world where American 
and German industry are in competition ? Is it 
not rather the mental state of the two nations 
that is the only possible source of any danger ? 
The object of quarrel is insignificant; it is the 
inner attitude which counts. If Americans and 
Germans like one another and have sympathy for 
one another's character, the whole of China will 
be too small to cause a conflict ; but if there is an 
antipathy between them, if neither trusts the 
nature of the other, the tiniest rock in the ocean 
may suffice to bring on a war which shall set the 
globe ablaze. Does not all this give an excuse 
to the psychologist who, though far from the 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 3 

mysteries of politics, ventures to take an impar- 
tial view of this interesting emotional case ? 

To live up to all the opportunities of scholarly- 
display which this chapter of social psychology 
offers, I ought to go back to the seventeenth cen- 
tury or at least to Frederick the Great, whose en- 
thusiasm for the American struggle for independ- 
ence furnishes plenty of material for all who like 
to make such introductions. But I am afraid that 
the usual fine quotations which show the absence 
of American-German frictions in earlier times 
have hardly any direct bearing on our present 
case. The Germans of a generation ago did not 
look much beyond the ocean in any case, and the 
German imagination pictured the land rather than 
the nation, — the land where gold was lying in 
the streets, and where every newcomer still found 
the chance of a free life. The American as a 
special type of man had not been discovered ; 
neither favorable nor unfavorable information 
about him was diffused, simply because nobody 
asked for it. On the American side it was some- 
what different. Milhons of German immigrants 
had poured into the land, and had become an hon- 
est and most industrious part of the population. 
Moreover, while they were bringing the spirit of 
the German working classes, thousands of young 
Americans were going abroad to bring home the 



4 AMERICAN TRAITS 

spirit of educated Germany. German music and 
German philosophy, German joyousness and Ger- 
man university spirit, came to these shores ; and 
yet, just as the American land of gold and liberty 
remained to the imagination of the German some- 
thing far and strange, so the Teutonic land of 
thinkers and poets remained to the American im- 
agination remote and vague. No one thought of 
comparison or of rivalry, because the two worlds 
seemed in different dimensions. 

But all this has changed overnight : the dreamy 
German and the adventurous American are sitting 
close together on the same bench, feeling that 
they must be either friends or foes. Wonderfully 
as the cables and twin-screw steamers have dimin- 
ished the distance in space between the two peo- 
ples, the diminution of the inner mental distance 
has been still more surprising and unexpected 
on both sides. Germany has become strong, 
rich, and powerful, and its politics have turned 
into realistic paths. On the other hand, the 
United States, since the country has come to ma- 
turity economically, has put its gigantic resources 
into the service of education and art and sci- 
ence. They are both thus moving in the same 
sphere, and the question is merely. Will they 
move shoulder to shoulder, or be ever at vari- 
ance ? Their feelings and emotions, even their 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 5 

moods, will decide about that : how do they feel 
to-day ? 

No sincere observer can deny that the two peo- 
ples in some respects do not like each other. It 
is by no means hate nor even animosity which 
separates them ; it is a kind of antipathy, a half- 
ethical, half -aesthetic aversion. It would be super- 
ficial and wrong to deny this f eeHng, and to main- 
tain that their dislike means commercial rivalry ; 
both are too fair and broad-minded — indeed, I 
may say, too idealistic — to dislike each other on 
account of wheat and sugar and pork ; they might 
struggle about the tariff, but tariff struggles be- 
come noisy and undignified affairs only because 
the masses lack mutual respect. Neither Germans 
nor Americans are accustomed in their social life 
to treat the neighbor who happens to be a fair 
competitor as an enemy. Competition is to them 
a stimulant, but not a poison which paralyzes the 
good will. The nations feel, hke private citizens, 
that the respect cannot be hurt by a divergence 
of economic interests, and that even friendship is 
possible in spite of emulation. But even those 
who accept unhesitatingly the materialistic theory 
of history, according to which economic factors 
alone determine the development of human rela- 
tions, have no case here, as in all essentials the 
past relation of the two countries has been one of 



6 AMERICAN TRAITS 

mutual economic help, the one nation needing 
just that which the other supplied, and thus offer- 
ing all the conditions for a solid union ; only the 
predictions of the future speak of rivalry, and 
they can certainly not account for the popular 
lack of sympathy in the past. The sharpness and 
unfriendliness of speech which is remarked some- 
times on both sides in political and commercial 
matters is not the cause of the national attitude, 
but its effect. It is not an objective irritating 
situation which forces on the two peoples an an- 
gry emotion ; it is the underlying emotion which 
too easily gives to every indifferent situation a 
touch of antagonism. The feeling is the primary 
factor, and its source is a certain misapprehension 
of character. The citizens of the two nations do 
not like one another because they do not regard 
one another as gentlemen : the American thinks 
the German servile and reactionary, narrow- 
minded and narrow-hearted ; the German thinks 
the American greedy and vulgar, brutal and cor- 
rupt. As long as large circles of the population 
have such a feeling, all the diplomacy of the two 
governments can merely apply plaster to the 
wounds, but cannot thoroughly heal them. Only 
one course is open for an organic improvement : 
the two nations must learn to understand each 
other and to feel the inner accord of their real 
characters. 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 7 

II 

Caricatures are not portraits, but they can be 
helpful in recognizing the essential features which 
the designer really believes himself to see in the 
original. The caricature of the German, popular 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is moreover not 
confined to the comic papers, but is excellently 
represented in the serious editorials of many news- 
papers ; and the funny German in a second-class 
American theatre is much less amusing than that 
absurd creature which in parlor gossip and club 
talk is quite seriously substituted for the inhab- 
itant of the fatherland. An American who has 
never been abroad invited me, the other day, to 
a German luncheon. I had to work my way 
through a series of so-called German dishes, which 
I had never tasted or smelled before ; and when 
finally imported sauerkraut appeared, and I had 
to confess that I had never tried it in my life 
and had never seen any one else eating it, my 
host assured me that I did not know anything 
about Germany : it was the favorite dish of every 
Prussian. The habits of this Prussian sauerkraut- 
eater are well known. He goes shabbily dressed, 
never takes a bath, drinks beer at his breakfast, 
plays skat, smokes a long pipe, wears spectacles, 
reads books from dirty loan libraries, is rude to 



8 AMERICAN TRAI ^S 

the lower classes and slavishly servile to the higher, 
is innocent of the slightest attempt at good form 
in society, considering it as his object in life to 
obey the policeman, to fill blanks with bureau- 
cratic red tape, and to get a title in front of his 
name. Most of this genus fill their time with 
training parade step in the barrack courts ; the 
others either make bad lyrical poems or five im- 
moral lives, or sit in prison on account of daring 
to say a free word in poHtics. But their chief 
characteristic comes out in their relations to wo- 
men and to the government. With calculating 
cruelty, they force women to remain uneducated 
and without rights ; in marriage they treat them 
hke silly playthings or servant-girls ; a woman 
with intellectual or aesthetic interests is, like every- 
thing which suggests progress, a horror to their 
minds. And lastly, their government : it is hard 
to understand why, but it is a fact that they in- 
sist on living without any constitution, under an 
absolute autocrat, and it is their chief pride that 
their monarch is an irresponsible busybody, whose 
chief aim is to bother his patient subjects. 

This is the " Dutchman " in American eyes ; 
but how does the Yankee look in the imagination 
of my countrymen ? In the German language 
the adjective " American " is usually connected 
with but three things. The Germans speak of 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 9 

American stoves, and mean a kind of stove which 
I have never seen in this country ; they speak of 
American duels, and mean an absurd sort of duel 
which was certainly never fought on this conti- 
nent ; and finally, they speak of American hum- 
bug, and mean by it that kind of humbug which 
flourishes in Berlin just as in Chicago. But the 
American man is of course very well known. He 
is a haggard creature, with vulgar tastes and 
brutal manners, who drinks whiskey and chews 
tobacco, spits, fights, puts his feet on the table, 
and habitually rushes along in wild haste, absorbed 
by a greedy desire for the dollars of his neigh- 
bors. He does not care for education or art, for 
the public welfare or for justice, except so far as 
they mean money to him. Corrupt from top to 
toe, he buys legislation and courts and govern- 
ment ; and when he wants fun, he lynches inno- 
cent negroes on Madison Square in New York, or 
in the Boston Public Garden. He has his family 
home usually in a sky-scraper of twenty-four 
stories; his business is founded on misleading 
advertisements; his newspapers are filled with 
accounts of murders, and his churches swarm with 
hypocrites. 

It is true that on bolh sides of the ocean there 
are some who know a little better ; but if the 
millions who enjoy the New York Journal and 



10 AMERICAN TRAITS 

the Berliner Lokalanzeiger have such character 
sketches in mind, how small is the influence on 
pubhc opinion of that little set which relies on the 
New York Evening Post and the Nationalzeitung ! 
And even these best classes, are they really so 
much freer from prejudice ? After all, the Ameri- 
can chngs to the belief that the German is reac- 
tionary and subservient, without a manly desire for 
freedom and independence, — that his Emperor is 
irresponsible, and the average subject no gentle- 
man ; while the American remains to German eyes 
dollar-thirsty and corrupt, vulgar and selfish, — 
on the whole, also, no gentleman. So when an 
English cable agency sends news to Germany that 
the Americans have fallen upon the poor Cubans 
to fill the pockets of senators, and are killing in 
the Philippines mostly women and children, and 
sends news to America that the Germans are slyly 
interfering with the navy in Manila or plundering 
Pekin or preparing a revolution in South America, 
is it surprising that the worst finds the readiest 
behef, and that public opinion in both countries 
cries, " How dare they, the rascals ! " 

That which alone seems surprising is that the 
brambles of prejudice can grow so exuberantly 
while the ocean steamers are crowded, going and 
coming. The hundreds of students who go yearly 
to German universities, the thousands of Ameri- 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 11 

can sight-seers who go every summer on pilgrim- 
ages from Heidelberg to Cologne, the millions of 
German immigrants who have been poured into 
this country, and the biUions of newspaper pages 
which are printed on both sides every year, — are 
they all unable to disseminate the truth ? But 
we cannot deny that the psychological conditions 
are more favorable to the survival of the false 
view, in spite of the blessed work of the Associated 
Press. The Americans who cross the ocean can- 
not see much of Germany and cannot teach much 
about America. A friend assured me once that 
there is only one classification of Americans which 
it is worth while to make, — those who have been 
abroad and those who have not. I cannot agree 
with him. I have met many whose minds have 
spanned the world, though they have never left 
the New England States, and many more who have 
strolled over the whole of Europe, and yet are 
as narrow and provincial as if they had never 
looked over the fence of their own back yards. 
A man may heartily enjoy the architecture of 
Niirnberg or Hildesheim, the paintings of Dres- 
den, the operas of Baireuth, the scenery of the 
Black Forest, and the uniforms of the lieutenants 
of the guard, and yet leave the country with all 
the absurd prejudices which he carried there. We 
are inchned by psychological laws to perceive 



12 AMERICAN TRAITS 

merely that which we expect to perceive ; we do 
not voluntarily suppress the remainder, but it does 
not exist for us at all. Germany has no freedom : 
thus the most harmless policeman on the street 
corner appears to be a tyrant, and brings before 
the mind of the traveler the terrors of mediaeval- 
ism. And when the bicycles must have a num- 
ber by day and a lantern by night, who can help 
thinking sentimentally of the free home over the 
sea, where everybody has the liberty to run over 
his fellow ; and where the landlady gives chops 
for breakfast, and not eggs alone; and where 
plenty of blankets, not feather beds, await you ; 
and where ice water flows and mince pies abound ? 
The little differences trouble the stranger and 
they swell in his imagination, while every good 
thing that does not fit with his anticipations fades 
away and is soon forgotten. Very few Americans 
come into a sufficiently intimate contact with the 
real German life to [get their traditional errors 
eradicated. 

But the usual Europe-trotter, on the other hand, 
does not help much to propagate the belief in 
American culture. He goes his way quietly, and 
no one will blame him for enjoying the view from 
Heidelberg Castle down to the Neckar Valley with- 
out making a speech for the glory of his coun- 
try. He remains unobserved ; but when a puffed- 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 13 

up parvenu from the West comes along, with 
noisy manners, he is observed, and he alone, — 
though one among scores, — is then " the Ameri- 
can ; " and if he puts his feet on the table in the 
hotel corridor, there are certainly a dozen men in 
the neighborhood who will never after relinquish 
the opinion that all Americans are hopelessly vul- 
gar and disgusting. 

Ill 

The Germans who travel to America either are 
on a journey or have come to stay. The first 
group contains few : they go, for the most part, 
from New York through Florida and the City of 
Mexico to San Francisco, and through the Yellow- 
stone Park, Chicago, and Quebec back to Hoboken. 
If they have done that in six months, they write 
only one or two magazine articles about the Amer- 
icans ; but if they have succeeded in doing it in 
six weeks, then they write a book, and a big one. 
They have of course seen everything : they have 
shaken hands with the President^ have witnessed 
a prize fight at an athletic club, visited the stock 
yards and the Indian schools, studied polygamy 
in Utah and the Chinese quarters in San Fran- 
cisco ; they have even met some one in the Pull- 
man car who knew all about the silver question 
and the next presidency. And when they have 



14 AMERICAN TRAITS 

added their own experiences in the barber shops 
and in the barrooms, the book will contain all 
that Germans can desire to know about America. 
They have not the remotest idea that this nation 
can show greater achievements than its hotels and 
railways. They have seen all the Baedeker stars, 
and do not guess that the tourist attractions of 
this country represent its real energies much less 
than do those of Europe. Europe, with its relics 
of history and art, may speak to the eye ; Amer- 
ica speaks to the understanding ; whatever na- 
tional life is here apparent to the eye is mostly 
but an imitation of Europe. The traveler is 
accustomed to open his eyes only, and to close his 
ears ; he descants for the thousandth time on the 
Rocky Mountains and Niagara, but he does not 
learn anything about the inner life, with its 
mountains of accompHshment and its cataracts 
of problems. There are plenty of excellent Ger- 
man monographs about special economic features 
of American Hfe which can be studied from the 
outside ; the studies on the more internal func- 
tions of education or religion are much more 
superficial, and nothing which really analyzes the 
inner man with full understanding has ever been 
carried home by the German traveler. On the 
other hand, he is too rare a guest to add anything 
by his appearance here to American ideas about 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 15 

the Germans. He remains the more unobserved 
because there is no lack of German nature already 
at hand to be inspected under the most various 
conditions ; for New York and Chicago have each 
more Germans than any German city except Ber- 
lin. Thus only the Germans who Hve here are 
able to represent their native country in the New 
World, and to take back to Germany true ideas 
about the inner American life. How has it hap- 
pened that even these millions have not dispelled 
the dense fog of Continental ignorance about the 
Yankees? How has it happened that the real 
America is still as undiscovered by the educated 
German as if Columbus had never crossed the 
ocean ? 

The German immigrant can justly claim to be 
a respectable and very desirable element of the 
American population : he has stood always on the 
side of solid work and honesty ; he has brought 
skill and energy over the ocean, and he has not 
forgotten his music and his joyfulness ; he is not 
second to any one in his devotion to the duties of 
a citizen in peace and in war, and without his aid 
many of America's industrial, commercial, and 
technical triumphs would be unknown. But all 
that does not disprove the fact that he is often 
somewhat unfit to judge fairly the life which sur- 
rounds him. First, he belongs almost always to 



16 AMERICAN TRAITS 

a social stratum in which the attention is fully 
absorbed by the external life of a country, and 
which is without feeling for the achievements of 
its mental hfe; he was poor in his fatherland, 
and lives comfortably here, and thus he is enthu- 
siastic over the material life, praises the railroads 
and hotels, the bridges and mills, but does not even 
try to judge of the libraries and universities, the 
museums and the hospitals. On the other hand, 
he feels socially in the background; he is the 
^^ Dutchman," who, through his bad English, 
through his habits and manners, through his 
tastes and pleasures, is different from the major- 
ity, and therefore set apart as a citizen of second 
rank, — if not slighted, at least kept in social iso- 
lation. On the side of the German, the result of 
this situation is often an entire ignorance of the 
Anglo-American life; he may go his way here 
for thirty years without ever breaking bread at 
the table of any one outside of the German circle ; 
he may even have become rich, and yet he is not 
quite in the social current. His ignorance is there- 
fore too easily coupled with unfairness ; the Ger- 
man who feels himself slighted tends to minimize 
the effect of the unfriendly attitude of the Anglo- 
American by sharp criticism : everything which 
seems strange is in his talk distorted into a defect, 
and every real weakness grows to a vice. Of 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 17 

course, there are not a few exceptions, not a few 
who are fully received, even if we disregard that 
less worthy class which buys recognition by dis- 
avowal of the fatherland, of whom some, in the 
interest of city politics, are said to be ambitious of 
becoming Irishmen. The large mass, however, 
continues in that social separation which makes its 
judgment an odd mixture of ignorance as to the 
inner life, unfairness as to the personal qualities, 
and blind admiration for the wealth and economic 
greatness of this country. In such a form the 
gossip of a hundred thousand family letters and 
saloon conversations pours into Germany, and 
naturally reinforces there, through that which it 
praises almost as much as through that which it 
blames, the feeling of antipathy toward the United 
States. Such German-Americans are not only 
unfit to judge Americans ; they are also, unfor- 
tunately, unfit to correct the traditional ideas of 
Americans about Germans. If they Hved up to 
their highest duty, they would work out in them- 
selves the noblest type of German ideals, in order 
to impress Americans with the best of the German 
nature, and thus make moral conquests for their 
old home. So did the generation of 1848 with a 
circle of admirable leaders, of whom, Carl Schurz 
became the best known representative. But no 
new generation has appeared after them to take 



18 AMERICAN TRAITS 

up the work, no new set has come in which has 
felt itself called upon to add to the glory of the 
fatherland. A few high-minded newspapers have 
faithfully shown the way ; Conried's Irving Place 
Theatre has been a source of inspiration with noble 
influence on the American stage ; a few eminent 
scholars are sprinkled over the country. But on 
the whole the German- American masses of to-day 
show little of the German tendency to higher aims. 
They are surprisingly indifferent ; their clubs and 
associations lack more and more the inspirations 
of earlier days, and they are satisfied to praise 
honesty as their peculiar German virtue instead of 
feeling it to be a matter of course. Alarmingly 
few men of individual power have grown up among 
those miUions. What characterizes the German at 
home, the tendency to idealism and the desire for 
intellectual life, has evaporated ; the artisan or the 
farmer, whose highest wish at home would have 
been to send his son to the gymnasium, and per- 
haps even to the university, is here glad if his 
boy becomes a clever business clerk as quickly as 
possible. It seems too often as if he imitated by 
preference the bad features of his surroundings. 
The exceptions merely confirm the rule that the 
average German- American stands in some respects 
below the level of the average German at home. 
This is hardly a result of the bad quahty of the 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 19 

immigrants ; on the contrary, the factors which 
determine the individual to cross the ocean make 
it probable that, in most cases, the stronger and 
more energetic personalities seek the wider field 
of a new country ; the lowering of the average 
must be the result of the new conditions of hfe, 
and not of the selection of the material. 

It seems, then, that the German-Americans 
have done but little to make the Germans under- 
stand America better, and perhaps still less to 
make the Americans understand the real Ger- 
mans ; they have given little help toward awak- 
ening in the two nations the feeling of mutual 
sympathy; and yet, as we have said, this alone 
is the way for an organic improvement of their 
political relations. If they had lived up to their 
duties in the last twenty years as they did in the 
fifties and sixties, the branches of the Teutonic 
race would have been united by a more cordial 
feeling, and many occurrences of the last two 
years would have been impossible. 

They alone have seen both countries with lov- 
ing eyes and loyal hearts, and they ought, there- 
fore, to be able to do justice to the true intentions 
of both parties. In their hands is the flag of 
truce. They must embody in themselves the 
best side of the German spirit, and they must 
open the eyes of Germans at home to what is 



20 AMERICAN TRAITS 

best in the American nature. Their work must 
of course be futile if they ignore the facts and 
tell fairy tales about the two countries. What is 
needed is nothing but the truth, freed from the 
traditional phrases of short-sighted prejudice. 

To be sure, the atmosphere in which the preju- 
dices take shape would have been different if the 
Americans of the old stock had shown a deeper 
understanding or a fairer appreciation of all the 
desirable features which the German immigration 
has added to the general American physiognomy. 
For the last three months of every presidential 
campaign the German voter is praised up and 
down as a model citizen and what not. But 
when the election is over, the Yankee feels him- 
self again as the host who alone has the full right 
to set standards, and the American " with a 
hyphen " is the guest who is tolerated, but who 
has to adjust his ideals to the English ways. He 
forgets too easily that the American nation is not 
a nation of Englishmen, but a new Enghsh-speak- 
ing people, in which the most various elements 
are fused into something new and original. This 
new nation, which is so decidedly un-English, not 
least in its smartness and its humor and its ora- 
torical flow, and which willingly accepts negro 
songs as its national melodies, ought to welcome 
gladly the infusion of German blood, instead of 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 21 

avoiding the social mixture. It is easy to make 
light of the music and the Christmas tree or to 
denounce the German breweries, but even the 
beer is a gain if it displaces the ruinous whiskey, 
and the music and the Christmas tree are merely 
symbols of characteristics which were certainly 
desirable additions to the temperament of the 
new nation. But there were more important fac- 
tors, — industry and civic virtues, which, brought 
over from Germany, helped to build up the land 
and the nation, and it is unfair to stamp the Ger- 
man-American as a citizen of second rank and 
thus to isolate him socially. 

It is really not surprising that the Germans in 
America dislike every approach to England, be- 
cause they feel instinctively that an Anglo-Ameri- 
can union reinforces the feeling that the Americans 
are an Anglo-Saxon nation in which other Teu- 
tonic elements are strangers. It was thus only 
natural that the rumors of an Anglo-American 
alliance a short time ago were the occasion — 
the first for many years — of gigantic demon- 
strations on the part of the Germans in the coun- 
try. It was not, as they themselves beheved it to 
be, a fight against imperialism, as in the question 
of imperialism the Germans are just as divided as 
any other group of citizens ; and it was still much 
less, as the newspapers of Germany believed it to 



22 AMERICAN TRAITS 

be, a demonstration against England in favor of 
Germany, but it was simply a reaction against the 
emphasis of the Anglo-Saxon character of the 
American nation, which means a social humil- 
iation for the German- Americans. The fault is 
thus clearly on both sides ; the native Americans 
and the German-Americans have participated 
equally in bringing about this separation. But 
for us it is not a question of blame, merely a 
question of fact; and the fact remains, that the 
German- American has lived in an isolation which 
has made him on the whole unfit for the role which 
would be most natural to him, that of giving 
to the Germans at home and to the Americans 
here a deeper mutual understanding of their real 
characters. 

IV 

I may perhaps be allowed to point out, as illus- 
trations, those two prejudices with regard to the 
character of the two peoples which strike me as 
an impartial observer most strongly, and which are 
really the root of the misunderstandings. I mean 
the traditional German opinion that the Americans 
have no idealism, but are selfish realists, and the 
American belief, that the Germans have no spirit 
of freedom. The belief that the Americans have 
no spark of idealism in their souls has done 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 23 

more harm to the relations of Continental nations 
with the United States than any protective tariff 
or any commercial competition. The largest 
newspaper of Berlin wrote the other day in a 
character sketch of the American : " The Ameri- 
can does not hesitate to cheat his best friend, but 
the most astonishing expression of the American 
lack of conscience is given in politics, which has 
been transformed by him into a swamp of cor- 
ruption, detestable as that of Russia and China. 
Every public office in America is for the office- 
holder merely an arrangement to steal and to 
fill his own pockets at the expense of the com- 
munity. That is the ideal purpose of life for 
everybody, from the simple alderman up to the 
senator in Washington. The American is always 
ready to sacrifice all the interests of the commu- 
nity to his private interests ; the non olet of the 
Emperor Vespasian has changed for him into It 
smells delightfully ! " For this chance quotation 
might easily be substituted a hundred others of 
exactly the same spirit. And such ideas, ham- 
mered daily into the mind of the German nation, 
for whom the honesty and integrity of the civil 
service is the basis of public life, must necessarily 
produce an antipathy which makes any under- 
standing difficult. It has surrounded every act of 
America with a cloud of selfishness and meanness 



24 AMERICAN TRAITS 

by which even the most harmless action becomes 
repugnant to sound feelings, and by which the 
most guileless man is made a prey to the news- 
papers of Europe. Granted that an American 
action can never have idealistic motives, it is not 
difficult to distort daily occurrences and historical 
events so that everything appears disgusting to 
a country which believes itself to have a prior 
claim upon every sort of idealistic feeling, and 
this emotion of the crowd then becomes the 
spring of political reactions. 

I think this attitude is utterly groundless. More 
than that, I think the true American is an idealist 
through and through. I perceive, to be sure, that 
his idealism is often loose and lax and ineffective, 
but it remains idealism nevertheless, and he de- 
ceives himself when he poses as a realist, like his 
English cousin. What most quickly misleads 
is, doubtless, his consuming interest in money- 
making, together with the sharp struggle for ex- 
istence, the gigantic scale of his undertakings, 
his hasty, impulsive movements, his taste for 
strong sensational stimuli, his spoils politics, and 
the influence of corporations upon his legislation. 
But is not all that merely the surface view ? The 
American is not greedy for money ; if he were, he 
would not give away his wealth with such a liberal 
hand, and would not put aside all the unidealistic 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 25 

European schemes of money-making which exclude 
individual initiative, as, for instance, the pursuit 
of dowries, or, on a lower level, the tipping sys- 
tem. The American runs after money primarily 
for the pleasure of the chase ; it is the spirit of 
enterprise that spurs him on, the desire to make 
use of his energies, to realize his personality. And 
there is one other factor : in a country where 
political conditions have excluded titles and orders 
and social distinctions in general, money is in the 
end the only means of social discrimination, and 
financial success becomes thus the measurement 
of the ability of the individual and of his power 
to realize himself in action. That the struggle 
for existence is sharper here than in Europe is 
simply a fairy tale. In a country where the great- 
est enterprises are undertaken in the service of 
charity, and where the natural resources of the 
land are inexhaustible, even the lowest classes 
do not struggle for existence, but, seen from the 
Continental standpoint, merely for comfort; of 
this the lyrical character of the discussions of 
social problems here compared with their dramatic 
character in Germany gives the fullest evidence. 

The manners and tastes of individuals are also 
easily misinterpreted. Those hasty, pushing move- 
ments look like an overflow of realistic energies, 
but they are simply the outcome of a lack of co- 



26 AMERICAN TRAITS 

ordination and adjustment. The quiet move- 
ments of the Englishman are expressions of 
strength and energy ; the hasty movements of the 
Yankee and his motor restlessness, manifested in 
the use of rocking-chairs and chewing-gum, are 
mere imperfections of the motor coordinating 
centres, an inability to suppress and to inhibit. 
In the same way, the demand for strong stimuli 
is not at all a symptom of over-irritation, as those 
usually claim it to be who consider American life 
a nerve- wearing clash of selfish energies. No, it 
is only insufficient training through the lack of 
aesthetic traditions. While over-irritation would 
demand that the stimuli grow stronger and 
stronger, experience shows that they soften and 
become more refined from year to year, stamping 
to-day as vulgar the acknowledged pleasure of 
yesterday. But the most amusing misunderstand- 
ing arises when the American himself thinks that 
he proves the purely practical character of his 
life by the eagerness with which he saves his time, 
on the ground that time is money. It strikes me 
that, next to the public funds, nothing is so much 
Vasted here as time. Whether it is wasted in 
reading the endless newspaper reports of murder 
trials or in sitting on the base-ball grounds, in 
watching a variety show or in lying in bed, in 
waiting for the elevator or in being shaved after 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 27 

the American fashion, in attending receptions or 
in enjoying committee meetings, is quite unessen- 
tial. The whole scheme of American education 
is possible only in a country which is rich enough 
not to need any economy of time, and which can 
therefore allow itseK the luxury of not asking at 
what age a young man begins to earn his own 
living. The American shopkeeper opens his store 
daily one hour later than the German tradesman, 
and the American physician opens his office three 
years later than his German colleague of equal 
education. This may be very good, but it is a 
prodigahty of time which the Germans would be 
unable to imitate. 

Still another prolific source of European com- 
ment is the anti-idealistic character of American 
politics ; but the critics overlook certain essential 
points when they deduce from it the intellectual 
state of the average citizen. It is, for instance, not 
at all fair to compare the political German news- 
papers with those of America, and to consider 
them as mirrors of the nation. In Germany all 
the newspapers which have a political value are ex- 
clusively for the educated classes, while in Amer- 
ica, every paper, and especially those which are 
seen most, is written for the masses. Social eco- 
nomic conditions make that necessary ; and it is, 
therefore, natural that the American paper makes 



28 AMERICAN TRAITS 

concessions to vulgarity which would be impossi- 
ble on the other side. Moreover, the critics over- 
look the fact that the machine politicians are not 
the representative men of this country. The 
same complex historical reasons which have made 
the party spoils system and the boss system prac- 
tically necessary forms of government have often 
brought representatives of very vulgar instincts 
into conspicuous political places; but that does 
not mean that the higher instincts are absent, 
still less that the alarming accusations which fill 
the press have more than a grain of truth in 
a bushel of denunciation. And, finally, it must 
be considered that politics in the narrower sense 
of the word, problems of government and of 
international relations, which occupy the central 
place in European public life, have been here, 
on the whole, in the background as compared 
with economic questions. These economic ques- 
tions, the tariff or silver or trusts, naturally ap- 
peal to the selfish interests of different groups; 
and schemes and methods which would be low if 
applied to controversies genuinely political do not 
exclude idealism if appHed to economic struggles. 
Wherever such and similar factors are eliminated, 
the American in politics proves himself the purest 
idealist, the best men come to the front, the most 
sentimental motives dominate, and almost no one 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 29 

dares to damage his cause by appealing to selfish 
instincts. Recent events have once more proved 
that beyond question. Whatever the senators 
and sugar men may have thought about it, the 
people wanted the Cuban war for sentimental 
reasons ; and if the uninformed Continental pa- 
pers maintain that the desire for war had merely 
selfish reasons, they falsify history. Is not the 
whole debate over expansion carried on with highly 
idealistic arguments on both sides ? Did not even 
the Anglo-American alliance ^et hold of the na- 
tion when the masses found an ideafistic halo for 
it, discovering that those Englishmen whom they 
wanted to fight two years before were of the same 
blood and the same traditions as themselves? 
Is it not entirely sentimental to use Washington's 
Farewell Address to-day as a living argument with 
which to determine practical questions? Even 
the most natural, selfish, and practical instinct 
can be overcome with the typical American by a 
catchy sentimental argument. 

This high spirit of the individual in politics 
repeats itself much more plainly in private life, 
where helpfulness and honesty seem to me the 
most essential characteristics of the American. 
Helpfulness shows itself in charity, in hospitality, 
in projects for education or for pubhc improve- 
ments, or in the most trivial services of daily life 3 



80 AMERICAN TRAITS 

while silent confidence in the honesty of one's fel- 
low men controls practical relations here in a way 
which is not known in cautious Europe, and could 
not have been developed if that confidence were 
not justified. Add to it the American's grateful- 
ness and generosity, his elasticity and his frank- 
ness, his cleanliness and his chastity, his humor 
and his fairness ; consider the vividness of his 
rehgious emotion, his interest in religious and 
metaphysical speculation, his eagerness always to 
realize the best results of science, — in short, look 
around everywhere without prejudice, and you 
cannot doubt that behind the terrifying mask of 
the selfish realist breathes the idealist, who is con- 
trolled by a belief in ethical values. Unde- 
niably, every one of these characteristics may 
develop into an absurdity : gratitude may trans- 
form the capture of a merchant vessel into a naval 
triumph, speculative desire may run into the 
blind alleys of spiritualism, fairness may lead to 
the defense of the most cranky schemes, and the 
wish for steady improvements may chase the re- 
former from one fad to another ; and yet it is all 
at bottom the purest idealism. Whenever I have 
written about America for my German country- 
men, I have said : " You are right to hate that 
selfish, brutal, vulgar, corrupt American who lives 
in your imagination ; but the true American is at 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 31 

least as much an idealist as yourself, and Emerson 
comes nearer to representing his spirit than do 
the editorial writers of the New York Journal." 
If I had to draw the American with a few lines, 
I should emphasize three mental elements. All 
the essential features of his public life spiing 
from the spirit of self-determination, which was 
developed by his separation from his mother 
country ; the features of his economic life, from 
the spirit of self-activity which was developed 
by his pioneer life ; and the features of his intellec- 
tual life from the spirit of self-perfection, which 
has a partly utilitarian, partly Puritan origin. 
Every one of these three strong tendencies involves 
dangers, but essentially they are forces of purely 
idealistic power. 



To-day I am writing for American readers 
only, and they would not show that fairness which 
I have just praised if they allowed me to prove 
the fallacy of prejudices merely when the preju- 
dices exist on the other side, and not when they 
are themselves at fault. I may, therefore, be per- 
mitted to touch at least one of the many precon- 
ceived ideas with which the Americans regard the 
German nation. I choose, as one case among 
many, the settled opinion that the Germans, the 



32 AMERICAN TRAITS 

poor suffering subjects of Emperor William, have 
no liberty ; that the men oppress the women, the 
higher classes oppress the lower classes, the no- 
bility oppresses the people, the army oppresses the 
civilians, and the Emperor oppresses all together. 
It must seem to the American newspaper reader 
as if India and Russia and Turkey had combined 
to invent the machinery of German civilization, 
in which the soldiers are tortured, the laborers 
imprisoned, the radicals treated as criminals, the 
women treated as slaves or as dolls, and the king 
treated as infallible. To be sure, such a text is 
not unknown in Germany itself ; the orators of the 
Social Democratic party would heartily applaud 
it, but it would not be the most effective party 
cry of the demagogues if the spirit of freedom 
were not the deepest element of the German 
nature, and the warning that their freedom is 
threatened the most exciting stimulus. Those, 
however, who do not wish for a distortion of the 
facts are sure that there is no people under the 
sun with more valuable inner freedom than the 
Germans, who, since Luther and Kant, have 
started every great movement toward freedom, 
and who would not have been at the head of the 
world of science for centuries had not freedom of 
thought been their life element, and the German 
university the freest place on earth. 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 33 

Moreover, if I consider the outer forms of 
life, I do not hesitate to maintain that Germany- 
is even in that respect freer than the United 
States. The right to insult the President, and to 
cross the railroad tracks where it is dangerous, 
and to ignore the law if a great trust stands 
behind one, and to spread the poison of anarchis- 
tic doctrines, is not freedom, but lack of social 
development, the survival of a lower civilization, a 
pseudo-freedom whose symptoms, fortunately, are 
disappearing from year to year in this country 
also. And they will disappear still more rapidly 
now, since the echo of the shot in Buffalo will not 
die out soon. The people will understand that 
not only the Polish and Italian fanatics who shoot 
and stab are guilty, but those who allow anarchy 
to be preached. However, the suppression of 
such doctrines of lawlessness is impossible if the 
principle is not acknowledged that the state has 
the right and the duty to limit speech for the pro- 
tection of its possessions, — and no possession is 
greater than the authority belonging to our high- 
est office, which is impugned not by the anarchist 
only, but by every one who uses vile language 
against the President. Freedom is not absence 
of limitations. The social intercourse of the well- 
mannered is not less free than that of ill-bred 
men, though they obey many more rules, and the 



34 AMERICAN TRAITS 

expression of thought is not less free when we 
obey the laws of good language ; no, it is freer 
than the expression of those who speak slang. 
Germans live under more complicated and sys- 
tematized rules than Americans, and for this very 
reason they have greater freedom than is possible 
in the less restrained rush of American life. 

The most typical case is, of course, that of the 
political government. The American takes it for 
granted that the republican state form represents 
a higher level than the monarchical one, and that 
therefore the German who comes to these shores 
must feel as if he were coming out into the fresh 
air from a prison. The educated Germans at 
home feel that it is with the monarchy as with the 
church. Too many men are adherents of the 
church from low motives, from fear and supersti- 
tion and laziness. When such narrow-minded per- 
sons become freethinkers and reject the church, 
they manifest individual progress; but that does 
not mean that destructive skepticism represents the 
highest possible relation to the church, and that 
to become an adherent of the church means fall- 
ing back to the lower stage. On the contrary, 
the step from skeptical enlightenment to an eth- 
ical belief is in every respect progress : it is the 
step from rationalism to idealism. The church 
can thus stand for the lowest and for the highest, 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 35 

and those who are in the middle, and have not 
yet reached the last stage, may well think that the 
highest is below their level. Just this manifold- 
ness of stages, the Germans maintain, character- 
izes the forms of states. To be sure, the mob is 
monarchical from low motives, and those who hold 
that the business of the state must be in the hands 
of a man whom the majority has selected certainly 
represent a higher moral stratum than those who 
support the throne from selfishness and laziness 
and cowardice. But again, a higher standpoint is 
possible. The true belief in monarchy means the 
belief in symbols which characterizes historical 
thinking as over against naturalistic thinking. 
And a monarch, as the historical symbol of the 
emotional ideals of a nation, wholly outside of the 
field of political struggles and elections, needs that 
symbolic protection against reproach which ap- 
pears, seen from a purely materialistic point of 
view, as the ridiculous punishment of lese-majeste. 
The same is true of all the symbolic values which 
radiate from the centre : the titles and degrees and 
decorations representing social differentiation seem 
childish to an eye which sees the world merely as 
a naturalistic mechanism, but invaluable to the 
eye which traces the outlines of the historical 
spirit in the world. Without differentiation there 
can be no complicated social life ; until the stage 



36 AMERICAN TRAITS 

of symbolic thinking is reached, quantitative dif- 
ferences must furnish the tags, and money furnish 
the only standard. But the flag is more than 
a piece of cloth, and the higher development of 
symbols means a higher civilization. The Ameri- 
can who, from the standpoint of his naturalistic 
thinking, looks down contemptuously on the Ger- 
man social and political organization hinders, so 
it seems to the foreigner, the progress of his own 
country ; America has become too great to stop 
at a social philosophy characteristic of the eigh- 
teenth century. An heroic revival is at hand, im- 
periahsm awakens echoes throughout the land, 
and days are near when Americans will under- 
stand better what we mean by the symbols of 
German history, and that it is not lack of free- 
dom that prevents us from believing overmuch in 
majority votes and the dogma of equality. 

But I am not at all afraid to turn the discus- 
sion from the philosophical to the practical side, 
from the idea of monarchy to the present Em- 
peror. I think there is no other man with whom 
the American newspapers have been so successful 
in substituting the caricature for the real portrait. 
The irony of the case lies in the fact that the hun- 
dreds of amusing stories about the Emperor all 
come from the camp of those bureaucrats with 
whom the Americans would sympathize least of 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 37 

all. There is nothing more incompatible with the 
American spirit than the temper of the pedants 
whose petty purposes the papers here have fur- 
thered, while there is nothing more in accord 
with the American mood than the true nature of 
the Kaiser. The one living American whose per- 
sonaHty most closely resembles that of the Em- 
peror William is the brilliant young President of 
the United States, who would have been elected 
as leader of the nation a few years hence if fate 
had saved his beloved predecessor. The Germans 
feel in the same way ; if Germany were to be- 
come a republic, the people would shudder at 
the thought of having one of the parliamentary 
leaders of to-day or an average general become 
President, but they would elect the present Em- 
peror with enthusiasm as the first President ; he 
is the most interesting, energetic, talented, in- 
dustrious, and conscientious personality of our 
pubhc life. Those, however, who maintain that 
the Emperor is an autocrat do not understand how 
closely the German monarchy, not only through 
the constitutional and parliamentary limitations 
imposed upon it, but still more in its inner forces, 
is identical with the national will. The powers 
of the American President, far greater than those 
of the Enghsh King, are especially with respect 
to foreign politics not at all less than those of the 



38 AMERICAN TRAITS 

German ruler. A President whose ministers can- 
not be interpellated by the parliament, and whose 
word can practically turn peace into war and alli- 
ance into annexation, in short, with tremendous 
powers, parties in the grasp of bosses, city admin- 
istrations under the whip of spoilsmen, the eco- 
nomic world under the tyranny of trusts, and all 
together under the autocracy of yellow-press edi- 
tors — No, I love and admire America, but 
Germany really seems to me freer. 

I have tried to show that it is equally one-sided 
and unfair for the Germans to maintain that the 
Americans have no idealism, and for the Ameri- 
cans to maintain that the Germans have no sense 
of freedom ; the two cases served merely as chance 
illustrations, instead of which I could have chosen 
many others. Wherever we look we find the 
same fact ; that the two great nations see each 
other through distorting spectacles, and do not 
understand each other's real character. They mis- 
interpret mere gestures, and therefore do not see 
the deeper similarity of their natures and their 
ideals. All this, of course, does not suggest that 
they are without important differences, but the 
differences seem to me much more the results of 
outer conditions than of character. In the outer 
conditions no stronger contrast is possible, — the 
Americans with a new national culture in an un- 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 39 

developed realm of immense material resources ; 
the Germans in a realm of limited resources, 
but with an old traditional culture. An old tra- 
ditional culture signifies a system of institutions 
in which the best spirit of past efforts is con- 
densed, and into which the individual is put by 
birth. The individual may be low-minded, and 
yet he must move in the given tracks, and is thus 
shaped to ends nobler than his own. The result 
is that, in Germany, the institutions are often bet- 
ter than the individuals, the forms of civilization 
higher than their wearers, the public conscience 
wider awake than the private. In the United 
States, with its new culture, just the opposite con- 
dition must prevail; the individuals are better, 
much better, than the institutions ; the individu- 
als are thoroughly idealistic, while the external 
forms of social life are by no means penetrated to 
the same degree with the idealistic spirit; they 
are still too often the survivals of the time when 
the new land had to be opened in a severe struggle 
for livelihood, and the commercial resources had 
to be developed at all costs. Consequently, these 
forms are now on as great a scale as the resources 
themselves, but they appeal still too often to the 
lower instincts, and too often tend to pull men 
down instead of raising them up. The individual 
conscience is here higher than the public con- 



40 AMERICAN TRAITS 

science ; Individual initiative and responsibility are 
wonderful, but the encouragement and inspira- 
tion which come to the individual from his public 
institutions are inadequate. 

The psychical effect of this situation is a neces- 
sary one. In Germany, where the institutions 
take the lead, the result is that the average man 
too easily believes he has fulfilled his duty when 
he appears to satisfy the pubhc requirements, and 
the spirit of individual initiative therefore slum- 
bers. In America this danger certainly does not 
exist, but the dangers resulting from the lack of 
inspiring energy in the centre are not less. In- 
stead of reinforcing the highest emotions, the in- 
stitutions adjust themselves to the lower instincts, 
and the psychological effect is that the higher 
energies are repressed, and the feeling of duty 
becomes less urgent in public life. We see the 
newspapers crowded with matter adapted to the 
lowest tastes of the mob, political results deter- 
mined by appeals to the most selfish desires, the 
theatres relying upon the cheapest vaudeville, 
the churches filled and sermons made attractive 
by sensational and trivial matters, — everywhere 
the same wilhngness to do what the public likes, 
and nowhere the question what the public ought 
to have. And this spirit must slowly undermine 
every public function. Such a system inevitably 



THE AMERICANS AND THE GERMANS 41 

provides a hothouse of mediocrity ; where there 
exists no social premium upon the highest efforts 
toward ideal interests, where no general appre- 
ciation stimulates individual energies, there is no 
maximum effect to be expected. The good per- 
sonal material secures a high average, but no great 
men ; everywhere fair solid work, nowhere a mas- 
terpiece ; ten thousand excellent public lectures 
every winter, and not one great thought. The 
social psychologist who begins to analyze the re- 
spective national characters has thus no reason 
for mere eulogy ; he sees shortcomings and de- 
fects on both sides, and sees still more clearly how 
much the two nations might learn from each 
other. But he does not find traces of those char- 
acteristics which in each arouse the disrespect and 
disgust of the other. The Germans are not ser- 
vile and reactionary, the Americans are not cor- 
rupt and materialistic and brutal. The two peo- 
ples are different, but the differences are of a kind, 
which suggests mutual supplementation and in- 
terest in each other, not antipathy and aversion. 
Neither one is made up of angels, but of men 
who would like each other most sincerely if their 
foolish narrow-minded prejudices were removed. 
These prejudices alone in regard to character, and 
no objective reason, have brought about the mood 
th^t occasions petty quarrels and unnecessary f ric- 



42 AMERICAN TRAITS 

tion between Germans and Americans, that Is, be- 
tween the two most healthy, most vigorous, most 
promising, and at the same time most similar na- 
tions of all which have entered on the twentieth 
century. 



n 

EDUCATION 

I 

I FEEL myself on the whole pretty free from 
autobiographical tendencies ; I am quite ready to 
double the number of my years, at least, before I 
begin on memories and confessions. At one point 
only has the desire for an autobiographical erup- 
tion grown in me steadily : I am impelled to tell 
the story of my school time. 

I remember exactly how the impulse took shape 
in my mind. It was at a teachers' meeting. The 
teachers were discussing how to relieve the over- 
burdening of the school children, and how to 
make tolerable the drudgery of the classroom. 
Some demonstrated that all the trouble came from 
the old-fashioned idea of prescribed courses : if 
the courses were freely chosen, according to the 
talents and interests of the pupils, their sufferings 
would be ended. Others maintained that the 
teachers were guilty : that they did not know 
enough about educational aims, about child study 
and psychology and the theory of education. 
What else than drudgery was to be expected, 



44 AMERICAN TRAITS 

under such inadequate pedagogues ? The fight 
between the two parties went on with an inspiring 
fullness of argument, and thus I fell into a deep 
and sound sleep. And the sleep carried me away 
from the elms of New England to my dear old 
home on the shore of the Baltic Sea, where I spent 
my school days. I saw once more my classmates 
and my teachers ; I strolled once more, as a little 
boy with my schoolbooks, through the quaint 
streets of Danzig ; I passed again through the 
feelings of more than twenty years ago. Sud- 
denly I awoke at the stroke of the gavel of the 
chairman, who solemnly announced that the ma- 
jority had voted for a compromise : the com- 
munity ought to see to it that both free election 
and the pedagogical information of the teachers 
were furthered. At this point the meeting was 
adjourned, and the teachers went to the next hall 
for luncheon : there some minor speeches were 
served up, on the pernicious influence of the clas- 
sical languages, and on the value of stenography 
and typewriting for a liberal education. It was 
then that the autobiography budded in my mind. 
My instinct told me that I must make haste in 
the undertaking; for if I should hear for some 
years to come all these sighs of pity for those who 
were instructed without election and pedagogy, I 
might finally get confused, and extend the same 



EDUCATION 46 

pity to my own childhood, convinced that my 
school life was a deplorable misfortune. I hasten, 
therefore, to publish this chapter of my life's 
story as advance sheets, some decades before the 
remainder, at a period when the gap of time is 
still small enough to be bridged by a fair memory. 
My great-grandfather lived in Silesia. But 
perhaps it may be too long a story if I develop 
my case from its historical beginning ; I will 
shorten it by saying at once that I entered the 
gymnasium in Danzig at nine years of age, and 
left it at eighteen. I had previously attended 
a private preparatory school, and subsequently I 
went to the universities of Leipzig and Heidel- 
berg. It is the gymnasium period of which I wish 
to speak. I have no right to boast of it ; I was 
a model neither of industry nor of carefulness. I 
was not quite so bad as some of my best friends 
among my classmates, but I see, with real repent- 
ance, from the reports which I have carefully 
kept together, that I was not attentive enough in 
Latin grammar ; it seems that in the lower classes, 
also, my French did not find the full appreciation 
of my teachers, and I should feel utterly ashamed 
to report what their misled judgment recorded of 
my singing and drawing. I was just a fair aver- 
age. The stages of knowledge which we reached 
may most easily be characterized by a comparison 



46 AMERICAN TRAITS 

with the standards of New England. At fifteen 
years I was in Untersekimda; and there is not the 
slightest doubt that, at that stage, all my classmates 
were prepared to pass the entrance examinations 
for Harvard College. As a matter of course, Ger- 
man must here be substituted for English, German 
history and literature for the English correspond- 
ents. We should have chosen, at our entrance, 
that scheme in which both Latin and Greek are 
taken. The Abiturientenexamen at the end of 
the school time, the examination which opens the 
door to the university, came three years later. 
It was a difficult affair, somewhat more difficult 
than in recent years ; and, from a pretty careful 
analysis of the case, I can say that very few Har- 
vard students have entered the senior class who 
would have been able to pass that examination re- 
spectably. In the smaller colleges of the coun- 
try, the senior might be expected to reach that 
level at graduation. No doubt, even after substi- 
tuting German for English, almost every senior 
may have taken one or many courses which lie 
fully outside of the circle in which we moved. 
The college man who specializes in political econ- 
omy or philosophy or chemistry from his fresh- 
man year knows, in his special field, far more than 
any one of us knew ; but if we take a composite 
picture of all seniors, the boy who leaves the gym- 



EDUCATION 47 

nasium is not at a disadvantage in the comparison 
of intellectual physiognomy, although far less ma- 
ture, conformant to his much lower age. If any 
man in Dartmouth or Amherst takes his bache- 
lor's degree with that knowledge in mathematics, 
history, geography, literature, Latin, Greek, 
French, and physics which we had on leaving 
school, he is sure to graduate with honors. Our 
entrance into the university can thus be compared 
merely with the entrance into the post-graduate 
courses. Our three highest gymnasium classes 
alone correspond to the college; and whoever 
compares the German university with the Ameri- 
can college, instead of with the graduate school, is 
misled either by the age of the students or by the 
external forms of student life and instruction. 

I reached thus, at the end of my school time, 
as a pupil of average standing, the scholarly level 
of an average college graduate in this country. 
I was then eighteen years of age; the average 
bachelor of arts is at least three years older. How 
did that difference come about ? The natural ex- 
planation of the case is that we poor boys were 
overburdened, systematically tortured by a cruel 
system of overwork, which absorbed all our ener- 
gies for the one goal, the passing of the examina- 
tion. I do not dare to contradict this. But the one 
thing I may claim in favor of this scheme of over- 



48 AMERICAN TRAITS 

loading is the wonderful skill with which the 
school administration was able to hide these evi- 
dent facts so completely from our eyes that nei- 
ther my classmates nor I, nor our parents, nor our 
teachers themselves, ever perceived the slightest 
trace of them. The facts were so shamelessly 
concealed from us that we poor deceived boys 
thought all the time that the work was a pleasure, 
that we had leisure for everything, and that we 
were all as happy as the day was long. 

I think that I spent, during all those ten years, 
about three hours a day in the fresh air, walking 
and playing, swimming and skating ; yet I found 
time from my ninth year to practice on the violon- 
cello one hour every day, and the novels which I 
wrote may have lacked everything else, but they 
never lacked length. Besides such individual 
schemes to fill our vacant time, we cooperated for 
that purpose in clubs, from the lowest classes to 
the highest : at ten years we played instructive 
games ; at twelve years we read classical dramas, 
each taking one role ; at fifteen we read papers 
on art and literature ; and at seventeen we had 
a regular debating club. And all the time, at 
every stage, there were private ' theatricals, and 
excursions into the country, and dancing lessons, 
and horseback-riding, and coeducation with the 
education left out ; for the poor overburdened 



EDUCATION 49 

girls helped us to bear the load by suffering in 
common. 

Every one of us had, of course, the minor spe- 
cial interests and amusements which suited his 
own taste ; there was no lack of opportunity to 
follow up these inclinations ; to use the terminol- 
ogy of modern pedagogy, we " found " ourselves. 
I found myself, too ; but — and in this respect I 
did not behave exactly according to the prescribed 
scheme of this same pedagogy, I am sorry to say — 
I found myself every two or three years, as some 
one very different from the former individual whom 
I had had the pleasure to discover. In the first 
years of my school time botany was all my desire. 
We lived in the summer in a country house with 
a large garden, and a forest near the garden ; and 
every minute I could spare belonged to the plants 
which I collected and pressed. It became a boy- 
ish passion. If I had to write a novel, this feature 
of the botanical enthusiasm of the boy would be 
a very poor invention, if the final outcome were 
to be a being who has hardly the talent to dis- 
criminate a mushroom from an apple tree, and for 
whom nothing in the world appears so dry as 
squeezed plants. But I have not to invent here : 
I am reporting. I thus confess frankly my 
weakness for dissected vegetables : it lasted about 
three years. Then came my passion for physical 



50 AMERICAN TRAITS 

instruments : an uncle gave me on my birthday 
some dainty little electrical machines, and soon 
the whole house was overspun with electrical 
wires. I was thus, at twelve years, on the best 
road to discover the patent-hunter in my per- 
sonaHty, when a friend with theological inclina- 
tions interfered : we began to study comparative 
religion, Islamism in particular. Thus, at fifteen 
years of age, we learned Arabic from the gram- 
mar, and read the Koran. Now, finally, my true 
nature was found ; my friend wrote prophetically 
in my album that we should both go out as mis- 
sionaries to the Arabs, — and yet I missed the 
connection, and went to Boston instead of to 
Mecca, and forgot on the way all my Arabic. 
But trouble began soon afterward, — friends of 
mine found, in digging on their farm, an old 
Slavic grave containing interesting urns. I be- 
came fascinated by ethnological discoveries, and, 
as important excavations were going on in the 
neighborhood of my native town, I spent every 
free afternoon and whole vacation weeks in the 
ethnological camp, studied the literature of the 
subject, and dug up urns for our town museum, 
and wrote, at the age of seventeen, a never pub- 
lished book on the prehistoric anthropology of 
West Prussia. Then the happy school days came 
to an end, and yet I had not found myself. I 



EDUCATION 61 

have never digged any more. I did not become 
an ethnologist, and if a visitor to Cambridge 
insists on my showing him the Harvard sights, 
and we come into the ethnological museum, the 
urns bore me so utterly that it is hard for me to 
believe that in earlier days they made all my 
happiness. I went, then, to the university with 
something like a hberal education ; supplemented 
the school studies by some broader studies in lit- 
erature, science, and philosophy; and when, in 
the middle of my philosophical studies, I came to 
psychology, the lightning struck. Exactly ten 
years after leaving school, years devoted to psy- 
chological studies and psychological teaching in 
German universities, Harvard called me over the 
ocean as professor of psychology. I thus found 
my life work ; and in all these years I have never 
had an hour in which I doubted that it was my 
life work. Yet I did not approach it, in spite of 
all those various fanciful interests, before I reached 
the intellectual level of the graduate school. 

II 

I have spoken of these boyish passions not only 
to show that we had an abundance of free time 
and the best opportunities for the growth of 
individual likings, but for the purpose of empha- 
sizing — and I add this with all the gratitude of 



52 AMERICAN TRAITS 

my heart to my parents, my teachers, and the com- 
munity — that the school never took the smallest 
account of those inclinations, and never allowed 
me to take the slightest step aside from the pre- 
scribed school work. My school work was not 
adjusted to botany at nine years because I played 
with an herbarium, and at twelve to physics 
because I indulged in noises with home-made 
electric bells, and at fifteen to Arabic, an elec- 
tive which I miss still in several high schools, 
even in Brookline and Koxbury. The more 
my friends and I wandered afield with our lit- 
tle superficial interests and talents and passions, 
the more was the straightforward earnestness of 
the school our blessing; and all that beautified 
and enriched our youth, and gave to it freshness 
and liveHness, would have turned out to be our 
ruin, if our elders had taken it seriously, and had 
formed a life's programme out of petty caprices 
and boyish inclinations. I still remember how my 
father spoke to me, when I was a boy of twelve. 
I was insisting that Latin would be of no use to 
me, as I should become a poet or a physicist. 
He answered : " If a lively boy has to follow a 
country road, it is a natural and good thing for 
him to stroll a hundred times from the way, and 
pick flowers and run for butterflies over the 
fields on both sides of the road. But if we say to 



EDUCATION 53 

him, * You need not keep the road ; follow your 
butterflies/ where will he find himself at night- 
faU?" 

My question was, how our German school made 
it possible to bring us so much more quickly, 
without overburdening us, to the level of the 
American senior. I have given so far only a 
negative characteristic of the school in saying that 
it made no concession to individual likinofs and 
preferences: that is, of course, not a sufficient 
explanation. If I think back, I feel sure that the 
chief source of this success was the teachers. 
But in regard to the teachers, also, I may begin 
with a negative statement : our teachers did not 
know too much about the theory of education, or 
about the history of pedagogy or psychology; 
and while I heard about some of them gossip of a 
rather mahcious kind, I never heard that any one 
of them had read a book on child study. The 
other day I found in a paper on secondary educa- 
tion a lamentation to this effect : that the Ameri- 
can schools have still many teachers who have no 
reflective theories on the aim with which they 
teach their subjects, and the educational values 
which belong to them. The author said : " I 
shall not soon forget the surprise with which an 
intelligent teacher said to me, not long ago, ^ An 
aim ! I have no aim in teaching ; that is a new 



54 AMERICAN TRAITS 

idea.' " " Such teachers of Latin and algebra^" 
the author compassionately added, "meant that 
the choice of these subjects as fit subject-matter 
of instruction was no concern of theirs; they 
taught these subjects as best they could, because 
these subjects were in the course of study." Ex- 
actly such old-fashioned teachers were ours. My 
literature teacher was never troubled by the sus- 
picion that literature may be less useful than 
meteorology and organic chemistry, neither of 
which had a place in our school ; and if some one 
had asked my Greek teacher, " What is the value 
of the instruction in Greek ? What is your aim 
in reading Sophocles and Plato with your young 
friends in the class ? " he would have answered 
that he had never thought about it, any more than 
why he was willing to breathe and to live. He 
taught his Greek as best he could in the place to 
which he was called, but he certainly never took 
it as his concern to reflect whether Greek instruc- 
tion ought not, after all, to be discontinued ; he 
left that to the principal and to the government. 
His Plato and his Sophocles, his Homer and his 
Thucydides, were to him life and happiness, and 
to share them with us was an instinctive desire, 
which would have lost its enthusiasm and inspira- 
tion if he had tried to base it on arguments. 
But this thought has led me from the negative 



EDUCATION 55 

characteristics of my teachers to a positive one, — 
yes, to the most positive one which I felt in them, 
— to the one which was the real secret of our Ger- 
man school : my teachers were enthusiastic on the 
subjects they taught, as only those who know 
them thoroughly ever can be. I had no teacher 
who hastily learned one day what he must teach 
me the next ; who was satisfied with second-hand 
knowledge, which is quite pretty for entertain- 
ment and orientation, but which is so intolerable 
and inane when we come to distribute it and to 
give it to others. I had from my ninth year no 
teacher in any subject who had not completed 
three years' work in the graduate school. Even 
the first elements of Greek and mathematics, of 
history and geography, were given to us by men 
who had reached the level of the doctorate, and 
who had the perspective of their own fields. 
They had seen their work with the eye of the 
scholar, and thus even the most elementary mate- 
rial of their science was raised to the height of 
scholarly interest. Elements taken for themselves 
alone are trivial and empty everywhere, and to 
teach them is an intolerable drudgery, which fills 
the schoolroom with dullness and the pupils with 
aversion. Elements as the introductory part of 
a scholarly system are of ever new and fasci- 
nating interest, more promising and enjoyable 



56 AMERICAN TRAITS 

than any complex problems. A great poet once 
said that any man who has ever really loved in 
his youth can never become quite unhappy in life. 
A man who has ever really taken a scholarly view 
of his science can never find in that science any- 
thing which is quite uninteresting. Such en- 
thusiasm is contagious. We boys felt that our 
teachers believed with the fullness of their hearts 
in the inner value of the subjects, and every 
new bit of knowledge was thus for us a new 
revelation. We did not ask whether it would 
bake bread for us. We were eager for it on 
account of its own inner richness and value ; and 
this happy hving in an atmosphere of such ideal 
belief in the inner worth and glory of literature 
and history, of science and thought, was our lib- 
eral education. 

I know it would be wrong to explain our being 
three years ahead of a New England boy merely 
from the scholarly preparation of our teachers. 
A second factor, which is hardly less important, 
stands clear before my mind, too, — the help which 
the school found in our homes. I do not mean 
that we were helped in our work, but the teachers 
were silently helped by the spirit which prevailed 
in our homes with regard to the school work. 
The school had the right of way; our parents 
reinforced our belief in the work and our respect 



EDUCATION 57 

for the teachers. A reprimand in the school was 
a shadow on our home Hfe ; a word of praise in 
the school was a ray of sunshine for the house- 
hold. The excellent schoolbooks, the wise plans 
for the upbuilding of the ten years' course, the 
hygienic care, the external stimulations, — all, of 
course, helped toward the results ; and yet I am 
convinced that their effect was entirely secondary 
compared with these two features, — the scholarly 
enthusiasm of our teachers and respect for the 
school on the part of our parents. 

No man can jump over his shadow. I can- 
not suddenly leave all my memories and experi- 
ences behind me, and when I behold the onward 
rush of our school reformers, I cannot forget 
my past ; I may admire their good will, but I 
cannot accept their bad arguments. I do not 
speak here as a psychologist ; I know quite well 
that some consider the psychologist a pedagogical 
expert, who brings the profoundest information 
directly from his laboratory to the educational 
witness stand. No such power has come to me. 
I do not know whether my professional brethren 
have had pleasanter experiences, but I have 
always found psychology silent as a sphinx, when 
I came to her with the question of what we ought 
to do in the walks of practical life. When I 
asked her about the true and the false, she was 



58 AMERICAN TRAITS 

most loquacious ; but when I came to her about 
the good and the bad, seeking advice and help, 
she never vouchsafed me a word. I confess that 
I have, therefore, slowly become a little skeptical 
as to whether she is really more communicative 
with my psychological friends, or whether they do 
not simply take her perfect silence for a welcome 
affirmation of all their own thoughts and wishes. 
I thus come to the question of school reform with- 
out any professional authority ; I come to it sim- 
ply with the warm interest of a man who has 
children in the schools, who has daily contact with 
students just out of school, and who has not for- 
gotten his own school time. 

Ill 

The most essential feature of all recent school 
reforms — or, with a less question-begging title, 
I should say school experiments — has been the 
tendency toward elective studies. But I am in 
doubt whether we should consider it really as one 
tendency only ; the name covers two very different 
tendencies, whose practical results are externally 
similar. We have on one side the desire to adjust 
the school work to the final purposes of the indi- 
vidual in practical life ; which means beginning 
professional preparation in that period which up 
to this time has been given over to liberal educa- 



EDUCATION 59 

tion. We have on the other side the desire to 
adjust the school work to the innate talents and 
likings of the individual, which means giving in 
the school work no place to that which finds inner 
resistance in the pupil. In the first case the 
university method filters down to the school ; in 
the second case the kindergarten method creeps 
up to the school. In the one case the hberal 
education of the school is replaced by profes- 
sional education ; in the other case the liberal 
education is replaced by hberal play. If one 
of the two tendencies were working alone, its 
imminent danger would be felt at once; but as 
they seem to cooperate, the one working from the 
bottom and the other from the top, each hides 
for the moment the defects of the other. And 
yet the coincidence is almost accidental and en- 
tirely superficial ; both desire to make concessions 
to individual differences. Peter and Paul ought 
not to have the same school education we are 
told; but the essential question of what, after 
all, Peter ought to learn in school must be 
answered very differently, according as we look 
at it from the point of view of the kindergarten 
or from the point of view of professional life ; as 
there is indeed a difference whether I ask what 
may best suit the taste and hking of Peter, the 
darling, or whether I ask what Peter, the man, will 



60 AMERICAN TRAITS 

need for the battle of life, in which nobody asks 
what he likes, but where the question is how he is 
liked, and how he suits the tastes of his neigh- 
bors. The one method treats the boy as a child, 
and the other treats the boy as a man. Nothing 
is common to them, after all, except the result 
that boyhood loses its opportunity for a liberal 
education, which ought to borrow from the kin- 
dergarten merely its remoteness from practical 
professional life, and from professional work 
merely its seriousness. 

Neither tendency stands alone in our social life. 
In short, the one fits the mercenary spirit of our 
time, and the other fits its spirit of selfish enjoy- 
ment. From the standpoint of social philosophy, 
mercenary utilitarianism and selfish materialism 
belong together; everywhere do they grow to- 
gether, and everywhere do they fight together 
against the spirit of idealism. But while they 
fight together, they march to the battlefield on 
very different roads. Practical life demands 
division of labor, and, therefore, the specializa- 
tion of the individual. The argument which 
urges the earliest possible beginning of this spe- 
cialization is thus a natural one, and the convic- 
tion that the struggle for existence must become 
more difficult with the growing complexity of 
modern life may encourage the view that the 



EDUCATION 61 

remedy lies in professional training at the expense 
of all other education. The lawyer and the phy- 
sician need so many facts for the ef&ciency of 
their work that it seems a waste of energy to bur- 
den the future lawyer with the knowledge of nat- 
ural sciences, and the future physician with the 
knowledge of history. If this is true, however, 
we ought to begin still earlier : on the first day in 
the kindergarten, I should show my little lawyer 
two cakes, and explain to him that one is his cake, 
and the other is not, — social information which 
does not lie in the Hue of my little naturalist ; 
and I should tell the other little fellow that one 
cake has plums and the other has not, — scientific 
instruction which is without value for the future 
lawyer. But even if I shape my school according 
to such schemes, do I really reach, after all, the 
goal at which I am aiming? Does not the utili- 
tarian spirit deceive itself ? And even if we do 
not acknowledge any other standpoint than the 
mercenary one, is not the calculation very super- 
ficial ? The laborer in the mill may be put, some- 
times, by the cruelty of the age of steam, in a 
place where his personality as a whole is crippled, 
and only one small function is in use ; but the 
higher the profession, the more nearly is the 
whole man working in every act, and the more, 
therefore, is a broad general education necessary 



62 AMERICAN TRAITS 

to practical efficiency. The biologists tell us that 
the play of animals is a biologically necessary pre- 
paration for the struggle of existence, and that in 
a parallel way, the playing of the child is the wise 
scheme of nature to prepare man in some respect 
for the struggles of life. How infinitely more 
necessary for the battles of manhood, though 
seemingly of no more practical use than such play, 
is the well-planned liberal education ! 

The higher the level on which the professional 
specializing begins, the more effective it is. I 
have said that we German boys did not think of 
any specialization and individual variation before 
we reached a level corresponding to the college 
graduation here. In this country, the college must 
still go on for a while playing the double role of 
the place for the general education of the one, 
and the workshop for the professional training of 
the other ; but at least the high school ought to 
be faithful to its only goal of general education 
without professional anticipations. Moreover, we 
are not only professional wage-earners ; we Hve 
for our friends and our nation; we face social 
and pohtical, moral and religious problems; we 
are in contact with nature and science, with art 
and Hterature ; we shape our town and our time ; 
and the experience is common to every one, to 
the banker and the manufacturer, to the minister 



EDUCATION 63 

and the teacher, to the lawyer and the physician. 
The technique of our profession, then, appears 
only as a small variation of the large background 
of work in which we all share ; and if the educa- 
tion must be adapted to our later life, all these 
problems demand a uniform education for the 
members of the same social community. The 
division of labor lies on the outside. We are 
specialists in our handiwork, but our heart work 
is uniform, and the demand for individualized 
education emphasizes the small differences in our 
tasks, and ignores the great similarities. 

And after all, who is able to say what a boy of 
twelve years will need for his special life work ? 
It is easily said in a school programme that the 
course will be adapted to the needs of the partic- 
ular pupil with respect to his later hfe, but it 
would be harder to say how we are to find out 
what the boy does need ; and even if we know it, 
the straight line tg the goal is not always the 
shortest way. 

The one need of my individual fate, compared 
with that of other German boys, is the EngHsh 
language, and the one great blank in the pre- 
scribed programme of our gymnasium was the 
total absence of instruction in English. Yet I 
have such unlimited confidence in the wisdom of 
my teachers that I cannot help thinking they knew 



64 AMERICAN TRAITS 

quite well how my ease stood. I can imagine that 
when I was twelve years old, the principal of the 
school said in a faculty meeting : " This boy will 
need the English language later, to philosophize 
on the other side of the ocean, and he ought to 
begin now to learn it, in time for his professional 
work ; to get the free time for it we must elimi- 
nate the Greek from his course." But then my 
dear little gray-haired Greek teacher must have 
arisen and have said with indignation : " No, sir : 
the bit of English which is necessary to lecture to 
students, and to address teachers' meetings, and 
to write for the Atlantic Monthly can be learned 
at any time, but Greek he will never learn if he 
does not learn it now ; and if he does not have it, 
he will never get that inspiration which may make 
his scholarly work worth calling him over the 
ocean. Only if he studies Greek will they call 
him to use English ; but if he learns only Eng- 
Hsh, he never will have the chance to use it." 
That settled my case, and so came about the curi- 
ous chance that I accepted the professorship at 
Harvard without having spoken a single word of 
English in my life ; and I still thank my old 
Greek teacher, who is long since dead, for his 
decision. Yes, as I think it over, I am inclined 
to believe that it is just so in most cases : if we 
prepare for the one thing, we shall have a chance 



EDUCATION 65 

for the other ; but if we wisely prepare at once 
for the other, our chance for it will never come. 
Life is, after all, not so easily manufactured as the 
advertising circular of a private boarding school, 
in which everything is exactly adapted to the 
individual needs. 

This elective adjustment of the studies to the 
later professional work and business of the man 
plays a large part in the theoretical discussions, 
and there acts effectively on the crowd through 
the promise of professional success ; but it strikes 
me that this utilitarian appeal works, on the whole, 
for the interest of that other kind of electivism 
which promises ease through the adjustment of 
the school to the personal inclinations. It seems 
to me that, in the practical walks of education, 
this is by far the stronger impulse to election. 
Even in the college, where most boys have at 
least a dim idea of what they want to do in life, 
the election with reference to the later occupa- 
tion usually plays a secondary role ; liking is the 
great ruler. The university method were power- 
less in the school reform, did it not act as agent for 
the kindergarten method. This leading plea for 
electives takes the following form : All instruction 
must be interesting ; if the pupil's interest is not 
in it, the whole instruction is dead matter, useless 
vexation. Everything which appeals to the nat- 



66 AMERICAN TRAITS 

ural tastes and instincts of the child is interest- 
ing. Instruction, therefore, must be adjusted to 
the natural instincts and tastes. 

The logical fallacy of this ought to be evident. 
All instruction which is good must be interest- 
ing ; but does it follow therefrom that all in- 
struction which is interesting must also be good ? 
Is it not possible that there are kinds of interest 
which are utterly bad and destructive ? All that 
appeals to the natural tastes and instincts is inter- 
esting ; does it follow that nothing is interesting 
which goes beyond the natural instincts ? Is it 
not savage life to follow merely the instincts 
and natural desires? Is not all the meaning of 
education just to discriminate between good and 
bad desires ? to suppress the lower instincts, and 
to reinforce the higher ; above all, to awake new 
desires, to build up new interests, to create new 
instincts ? If civilization, with its instruments of 
home and school education, could not overcome 
our natural tastes and instinctive desires, we 
should remain forever children whose attention is 
captured by everything that excites and shines. 
The street tune would expel the symphony, the 
prize fight would overcome the drama, the yellow 
press and the dime novel would be our literature ; 
our social hfe would be vulgar, our public life 
hysterical, and our intellectual life a mixture of 



EDUCATION 67 

cheap gossip and sensational news with practical 
schemes for comfort and advertisement. Yes, 
instruction must be full of interest ; but whether 
instruction is good or bad, is in the spirit of civi- 
lization or against it, depends upon the question 
what sort of interest is in the play, — that which 
vulgarizes, or that which refines ; that which the 
street boy brings from the slums to the school, or 
that which the teacher brings from the graduate 
school to the country classroom. The more inter- 
nal the motives which capture the attention, the 
higher the mental functions to which we appeal, 
the more we are really educators. The platform 
is no variety show ; the boys must be inspired, but 
not amused. 

I am not afraid to push my heresy even to 
the point of seeing with serious doubts the rap- 
idly growing tendency toward the demonstrative 
method in scientific instruction. No doubt all 
such illustrations strongly appeal to common 
sense ; our happy children, the public thinks, see 
and touch everything, where we had only words 
on words. But the words appealed to a higher 
power than the demonstrations, — those spoke to 
the understanding, these to the perception ; those 
gave us the laws, these the accidental realiz- 
ations. No demonstration, no experiment, can 
really show us the totahty of a law ; it shows us 



68 AMERICAN TRAITS 

always only one special case, which as such is 
quite unimportant. Its importance lies in the 
necessity which can be expressed merely by words, 
and never by apparatus. The deeper meaning of 
naturalistic instruction is by far more fully pre- 
sent in the book than in the instrument ; and 
while it is easier to teach and to learn natural 
science when it appeals to the eye rather than to 
the reason, I doubt whether it has, from a higher 
standpoint, the same educational value, just as I 
doubt whether the doll with a silk dress and a 
phonograph in the chest has the same value for 
the development of the child at play that the sim- 
ple httle wooden doll has. The question of scien- 
tific instruction is, of course, far too complex to 
be analyzed here ; the method of demonstrations 
has some good features ; and above all, the other 
kind of instruction, to be valuable at all, needs 
much better teachers than those whom the schools 
have at their disposal. I wish only to point out 
that even here, where the popular agreement is 
unanimous, very serious hesitation is possible. 

I have spoken of the damage to the subject- 
matter of instruction, which results from the lim- 
itation of the work to personal taste ; but there 
is also a formal side of education, which is to me 
more important. A child who has himself the 
right of choice, or who sees that parents and 



EDUCATION 69 

teachers select the courses according to his tastes 
and inclinations, may learn a thousand pretty 
things, but never the one which is the greatest of 
all : to do his duty. He who is allowed always to 
follow the paths of least resistance never develops 
the power to overcome resistance ; he remains ut- 
terly unprepared for life. To do what we like to 
do, — that needs no pedagogical encouragement : 
water always runs downhill. Our whole public 
and social life shows the working of this impulse, 
and our institutions outbid one another in cater- 
ing to the taste of the public. The school alone 
has the power to develop the opposite tendency, 
to encourage and train the belief in duties and 
obligations, to inspire devotion to better things 
than those to which we are drawn by our lower 
instincts. Yes, water runs downhill all the time ; 
and yet all the earth were sterile and dead if water 
could not ascend again to the clouds, and supply 
rain to the field which brings us the harvest. We 
see only the streams going down to the ocean ; we 
do not see how the ocean sends up the waters to 
bless our fields. Just so do we see in the streams 
of life the human emotions following the impulses 
down to selfishness and pleasure and enjoyment, 
but we do not see how the human emotions ascend 
again to the ideals, — ascend in feelings of duty and 
enthusiasm ; and yet without this upward move- 



70 AMERICAN TRAITS 

ment bur fields were dry, our harvest lost. That 
invisible work is the sacred mission of the school ; 
it is the school that must raise man's mind from 
his likings to his belief in duties, from his instincts 
to his ideals, that art and science, national honor 
and morality, friendship and religion, may spring 
from the ground and blossom. 

IV 

But I go further : are elective studies really 
elected at all ? I mean, do they really represent 
the deeper desires and demands of the individual, 
or do they not simply express the cumulation of a 
hundred chance influences ? I have intentionally 
lingered on the story of my shifting interests in 
my boyhood ; it is more or less the story of every 
halfway-intelligent boy or girl. A Httle bit of 
talent, a petty caprice favored by accident, a con- 
tagious craze or fad, a chance demand for some- 
thing of which scarcely the outside is known, — 
all these whirr and buzz in every boyhood ; but 
to follow such superficial moods would mean the 
dissolution of all organized life, and education 
would be an empty word. Election which is 
more than a chance grasping presupposes first of 
all acquaintance with the object of our choice. 
Even in the college two thirds of the elections are 
haphazard, controlled by accidental motives ; elec- 



EDUCATION 71 

tion of courses demands a wide view and broad 
knowledge of the whole field. The lower the 
level on which the choice is made, the more exter- 
nal and misleading are the motives which direct 
it. A helter-skelter chase of the unknown is no 
election. If a man who does not know French 
goes into a restaurant where the bill of fare is 
given in the French language, and points to one 
line and to another, not knowing whether his 
order is fish or roast or pudding, the waiter will 
bring him a meal, but we cannot say that he has 
" elected his courses." 

From whatever standpoint I view it, the ten- 
dency to base the school on elective studies seems 
to me a mistake, — a mistake for which, of course, 
not a special school, but the social consciousness 
is to be blamed. I cannot think much better of 
that second tendency of which I spoke, — the 
tendency to improve the schools by a pedagogic- 
psychological preparation of the teachers. I said 
that, just as I had no right of election over my 
courses, my teachers did not base my education on 
theories of pedagogy and psychology. I do not 
think that they would have been better teachers 
with such wisdom than without it. I doubt, even, 
whether it would not have changed things for the 
worse. I do not beheve in lyrics which are writ- 
ten after the prescriptions of aesthetics ; I have 



72 AMERICAN TRAITS 

the fullest respect for the scholar in poetical the- 
ory, but he ought not to make the poets believe 
that they need his advice before they dare to sing. 
Psychology is a wonderful science, and pedagogy, 
as soon as we shall have it, may be a wonderful 
science, too, and very important for school organ- 
izers, for superintendents and city ojfficials, but 
the individual teacher has little practical use for 
it. I have discussed this point so often before 
the public that I am unwilling to repeat my argu- 
ments here. I have again and again shown that 
in the practical contact of the schoolroom the 
teacher can never gain that kind of knowledge 
of the child which would enable him to get the 
right basis for psychological calculation, and that 
psychology itself is unable to do justice to the 
demands of the individual case. I have tried 
to show how the conscious occupation with peda- 
gogical rules interferes with instinctive views of 
right pedagogical means ; and, above all, how 
the analytic tendency of the psychological and 
pedagogical attitude is diametrically opposite to 
that practical attitude, full of tact and sympathy, 
which we must demand of the real teacher ; and 
that the training in the one attitude inhibits free- 
dom in the other. And when I see that teachers 
sometimes interpret my warning as if I wished 
merely to say, " I, as a psychologist, dislike to 



EDUCATION 73 

have any one approach the science with the purely- 
practical question whether it bakes bread, instead 
of with a purely theoretical interest/' I must ob- 
ject to that interpretation. I did not wish merely 
to say that the bread question would better be de- 
layed ; no, the teacher ought to know from the 
beginning that if he takes the bread which psy- 
chology bakes, indigestion must follow. 

Yet I do not mean to be narrow. I do not 
think that if teachers go through psychological 
and pedagogical studies they will really suffer 
very much ; they will do with them what they do 
with most studies, — they will forget them. And 
if they forget them, what harm, then, — why all 
this fighting against it, as if a danger were in 
question ? This brings me, finally, to my last but 
chief point : I think, indeed, that great dangers 
do exist, and that the psycho-pedagogical move- 
ment does serious damage, not so much because 
it affects the teacher, but because it, together with 
the enthusiasm for elective studies, turns the at- 
tention of the public from the only essential and 
important point, upon which, I feel deeply con- 
vinced, the true reform of our schools is depen- 
dent, — the better instruction of our teachers. 
That was the secret, I said, in our German 
schools ; the most elementary teaching was given 
by men who were experts in their field, who had 



74 AMERICAN TRAITS 

the perspective of it, and whose scholarly interest 
filled them with an enthusiasm that inspired the 
class. To bring that condition about must be 
the aim of every friend of American school life. 
That is the one great reform which is needed, and 
till this burning need is removed it is useless to 
institute unimportant changes. These little pseu- 
do-reforms become, indeed, a wrong, if they make 
the public forget that true help and true reform 
are demanded. If a child is crying because it is 
ill, we may keep it quiet for a while by a piece of 
candy, but we do not make it well ; and it is a 
wrong to quiet it, if its silence makes us omit to 
call the physician to cure it. The elective studies 
and the pedagogical courses are such sweetmeats 
for education. The schools were bad, and the 
public was dissatisfied ; now the elective studies 
relieve the discomfort of the children, in the place 
of the old vexation they have a good time, and 
the parents are glad that the drudgery is over. 
And when, nevertheless, a complaint arises, and 
the parents discover that the children do not learn 
anything and that they become disrespectful, then 
there comes the chance for the man with the psy- 
chological — and pedagogical — training ; he is 
not a better teacher, but he can talk about the 
purposes of the new education till all is covered 
by beautiful words 5 and thus parents and chil- 



EDUCATION 75 

dren are happily satisfied for a while, till the time 
comes when the nation has to pay for its neglect 
in failing really to cure the sick child. Just as it 
has been said that war needs three things, money, 
money, and again money, so it can be said with 
much greater truth that education needs, not forces 
and buildings, not pedagogy and demonstrations, 
but only men, men, and again men, — without for- 
bidding that some, not too many of them, shall 
be women. 

The right kind o£ men is what the schools 
need; they have the wrong kind. They need 
teachers whose interest in the subject would banish 
all drudgery, and they have teachers whose pitiable 
unpreparedness makes the class work either so 
superficial that the pupils do not learn anything, 
or, if it is taken seriously, so dry and empty that 
it is a vexation for children and teachers alike. 
To produce anything equivalent to the teaching 
staff from whose guidance I benefited in my boy- 
hood, no one ought to be allowed to teach in a 
grammar school who has not passed through a 
college or a good normal school ; no one ought to 
teach in a high school who has not worked, after 
his college course, at least two years in the grad- 
uate school of a good university ; no one ought 
to teach in a college who has not taken his doc- 
tor's degree in one of the best universities 3 and 



76 AMERICAN TRAITS 

no one ought to teach m a graduate school who 
has not shown his mastery o£ method by powerful 
scientific publications. We have instead a misery 
which can be characterized by one statistical fact : 
only two per cent of the schoolteachers possess 
any degree whatever. If the majority of college 
teachers are hardly prepared to teach in a second- 
ary school, if the majority of high-school teachers 
are hardly fit to teach in a primary school, and 
if the majority of primary-school teachers are 
just enough educated to fill a salesgirl's place in 
a millinery store, then every other reform is seK- 
deceit. 

I do not feel at all surprised that many of my 
brethren who are seriously interested in the pro- 
gress of education rush forward in the wrong 
direction. They have been brought up under 
the prescribed system, with teachers who did not 
know pedagogy, and they feel instinctively that 
the schools are bad and need reform. It is only 
natural for them to think that the prescriptive 
system is guilty, and that pedagogy can help us ; 
they are so filled with aversion to the old-fash- 
ioned school that they think only of the matter 
which they were taught and the method after which 
they were taught ; but as they have no standard 
of comparison in their own experience, they never 
imagine that it may have been the men alone, the 



EDUCATION 77 

teachers, who were responsible for the failures. 
These friends have never experienced what my 
classmates and I enjoyed, — prescribed courses 
with expert teachers. They do not and cannot 
imagine the revolution which comes into the 
schoolroom as soon as a teacher stands on the 
platform who has the inspiring enthusiasm for his 
science which springs from a profound scholarly 
knowledge. No pedagogical technique can be 
substituted for this only real preparation of the 
teacher ; and I fear that pedagogy must become 
a hindrance to educational progress, if it ever 
causes the principal or the school board to prefer 
the teacher who has learned pedagogy to the 
teacher who has learned the subject he is going 
to teach. 

My German memories, however, not only arouse 
in me a pessimism with regard to those pseudo- 
reforms ; they give me also most optimistic views 
with regard to a point which may be raised as an 
objection to my views. The teaching staff is bad 
indeed, it has often been said, but how can we 
hope for an improvement ? The boys leave the 
high school at eighteen years of age, the college 
at twenty-two ; how can we hope that an average 
high-school teacher will devote a still larger part 
of his life to the preparation for his professional 
work, and will spend two or three years more in 



78 AMERICAN TRAITS 

a graduate school before he begins to earn his 
living ? This argument is utterly wrong, as it 
neglects the interrelation of the different factors. 
If we had thoroughly prepared teachers, the aims 
of the school would be reached here just as 
quickly as in Germany, where, as I have shown, 
the level of American high-school graduation is 
attained at fifteen years, and the level of average 
American college graduation at nineteen. Time 
which, with the teachers of to-day, is hardly suffi- 
cient to bring a man through a good high school 
would then be enough to give him a college edu- 
cation, and the time which to-day is necessary to 
pull him through college should be enough to give 
him three years in the graduate school. I was 
twenty-two when I took my doctor's degree in 
Leipzig, and so were most of my friends. The 
change cannot come suddenly; but as soon as 
the pubHc recognizes in what direction true re- 
form of education must lie, it can be brought 
about by a slow, persistent pushing along that 
line. If the schools insist more and more on 
the solid scholarship of the teachers, the time in 
which the ends of the school are reached will be- 
come shorter and shorter : this will give more and 
more room for the continuation of study on the 
part of the future teachers, and thus we should 
enter upon a beneficial revolution which would 



EDUCATION 79 

in a short time supply the whole country with effi- 
cient teachers. If we look at the situation from 
this point of view, we can hardly doubt that even 
those who have only the utilitarian interest in 
mind, — yes, even those who think of the mer- 
cenary aspect only, — that even those must pre- 
fer this true reform to the efforts of the " new 
education " men who operate with pedagogy and 
elective studies. Those three years which every 
American boy loses through the bad preparation 
of his teachers represent a loss for the practical 
achievement in later hf e which cannot be compen- 
sated for by an early beginning of professional 
training through electives. It is a loss for the 
man, and an incomparable loss for the nation. 

I merely indicated one other feature of our 
German education when I disclosed the secret of 
its efficiency. I said that our parents reinforced 
in us respect for the school, and that the home 
atmosphere was filled with behef in the duties of 
school life. Our parents did not need mothers' 
clubs and committees for that, and there was Httle 
discussion about what children need in ahstracto ; 
but they made their children feel that the home 
and the school were working in alliance. We 
boys took all that as a matter of course, and what 
it meant I never quite understood before I crossed 
the ocean. I feel inclined to say that what our 



80 AMERICAN TRAITS 

schoolchildren need is not only good teachers, but 
also good parents. They need fathers who feel 
the responsibility to be the ultimate moral guides 
of the youth and who do not undermine by care- 
lessness the patient work of the teacher. They 
need mothers who through all their love and in- 
dulgence steadily insist on the seriousness of duties 
and who are not misled by the superficial theories 
of half-educated educators to believe that persua- 
sion only and never command has to enter the 
nursery. They need parents who understand 
what they are doing when they keep their chil- 
dren at home from school on rainy days or let 
them omit the school work when guests are com- 
ing, when they allow their youngsters to be idle 
through the whole long vacations, when they urge 
the school to reduce and reduce the daily home 
work, and when they enjoy the jokes of the child 
on the teacher. It is a noble thing that Ameri- 
cans put millions into new schoolhouses, but to 
build up the education in the classroom without 
a foundation in the serious responsible aid of the 
parents, is not better than to build those magnifi- 
cent buildings of brick and stone on shifting sand. 



'I 



III 

SCHOLARSHIP 



The idea of continental Europe in regard to 
the productive scholars of the New World can be 
as easily as briefly stated : there is none. A widely 
read German history of civilization says this about 
American scholarship : " American universities 
are hardly more than ordinary schools in Germany. 
It is true, they receive large sums of money from 
rich men ; but they cannot attain to anything, 
because the institutions either remain under the 
control of the church, or the professors are ap- 
pointed on account of their political or personal 
connections, not on account of their knowledge. 
The professors therefore have, naturally, more 
interest in money-making than in the advance- 
ment of science. Not a single one of these insti- 
tutions has reached a scientific position." And 
if this expresses the opinion of the public at large, 
it must be admitted that the scholars are seldom 
much better informed. They see hundreds of 
American students migrating to Germany every 
year, and feel sure that they would not come in 



82 AMERICAN TRAITS 

such streams if America had anything of com- 
parable value to offer. American publications 
cross the ocean in a ridiculously small number ; 
in the world of letters no Columbus has yet dis- 
covered the other side of the globe. 

Is it necessary to defend myself against the 
suspicion that I share this European prejudice ? I 
have my witnesses in print. Since I resigned my 
German professorship to enter Harvard Univer- 
sity, I have heartily welcomed every opportunity 
to write for German readers about my delightful 
surprises in the academic world here, and about 
the contrast between the facts here and the fables 
current over there. Last summer I had a glorious 
opportunity. A well-known naturalist of Swit- 
zerland, whose opinions are often heard in Ger- 
man magazines, came here for scientific purposes, 
and spent his vacation in various places. When 
he returned, he gathered his impressions in an 
essay published in the most widely read review, 
and condensed his opinions on American univer- 
sities as follows : " The American universities 
are of unequal value ; some are simply humbug. 
They are all typically American, illustrating in 
every respect the American spirit ; they have 
an essentially practical purpose. The American 
wishes to see quick returns in facts and suc- 
cesses 3 he has scarcely ever any comprehension 



SCHOLARSHIP 83 

of theory and real science. He has not yet had 
time to understand that scholarly truth is like a 
beautiful woman^ who should be loved and hon- 
ored for her own sake, while it is a degradation 
to value her only for her practical services : a 
Yankee brain of to-day cannot grasp that/' — 
and so on. I published at once in the same mag- 
azine an extended reply. I demonstrated therein 
how easily the foreigner is misled by the use of 
the word " university " for institutions which are 
nothing but colleges, and that, therefore, a fair 
comparison with German universities is possible 
only for the dozen institutions which are adjusted 
to postgraduate work. I pointed out that in these 
leading universities the opportunities ojffered stu- 
dents are not inferior to those abroad ; that the 
theoretical courses, not the practical ones, are 
favored by the students ; and that, especially in 
unpractical fields, as astronomy, geology, eth- 
nology, Sanskrit, English philology, philosophy, 
very valuable work has been done. I claimed with 
full conviction that the doctor's degree of our * 
best universities is superior to the average degree 
in Germany, and that our libraries and equip- 
ments are not seldom better than those on the 
other side. I showed with enthusiasm what an 
increasing number of scholarly magazines is sent 
out by our institutions, how great is the output 



84 AMERICAN TRAITS 

of new books in every field, how the academies 
and scholarly associations flourish. Yes, I became 
pathetic, and sentimental, and ironical, and en- 
thusiastic, and my friends maintained that I made 
my point ; and yet in my heart I was glad that 
no one raised the other question, whether I really 
believed that American scholarship is to-day all 
that it ought to be. I should have felt obliged 
to confess that I did not ; and as I speak now to 
Americans only, I may add here all that I forgot 
to tell my German readers. 

I do not want to disclaim a single word of my 
German plea for the American world of learning. 
The situation is infinitely better than Europeans 
suppose it to be, — in certain branches of know- 
ledge excellent work has been done ; and yet I 
am convinced that the result stands in no proper 
proportion to the achievements of American cul- 
ture in all the other aspects of national life, a 
fact which the best American scholars every- 
where frankly acknowledge and seriously deplore. 
Yes, America now has scholarship, as well as 
Germany; but it is just as when the Germans 
claim that they, as well as the Americans, play 
football, — they do play it, to be sure, but in cut- 
aways and high collars. Many Americans consider 
that there is nothing amiss with the condition of 
scholarship here, and some are even proud of it ; 



SCHOLARSHIP 85 

a nation which has to " do " things ought not to 
care much for knowledge. But there are others 
who see the dangers of such an attitude. They 
beheve that there is no ideal of learning and 
searching for truth which is too high for the 
American nation. They think, as Emerson said, 
that " our days of dependence, our long appren- 
ticeship to the learning of other lands draws to 
a close ; the millions that around us are rushing 
into life cannot always be fed on the remains of 
foreign harvests." And as the first necessary 
condition of such a change they seek a clear in- 
sight into the causes which lie at the root of this 
shortcoming. To these it may perhaps appear not 
quite useless to try to throw light on those causes 
from the standpoint of a comparison between the 
American and the German conditions for produc- 
tive scholarship. 

In America, as in Germany, the question of 
productive scholarship is essentially a university 
question, as in both countries the chief advancers 
of knowledge have been at the same time profes- 
sional daily teachers of academic youth. This 
relation is in itself not at all necessary, and cer- 
tainly does not hold true for other countries, such 
as France and England. In England and in 
France, a great part of the finest scholarly work 
has been done by men who had no relations to 



86 AMERICAN TRAITS 

academic institutions; and if they filled univer- 
sity positions, their role was, on the whole, a 
decorative one, while the real daily teaching was 
done by minor men. Here, as in Germany, the 
union of scholar and teacher in one person is 
the rule ; the scholars who are not teachers are 
in both countries the exception. I do not over- 
look the fact that such exceptional cases exist on 
both sides ; historians hke Rhodes, Fiske, Lodge, 
Roosevelt, and others stand outside of academic 
life. A similar situation is occupied by some 
economists and some naturalists, especially those 
connected with the government institutions in 
Washington ; there are physicians and inventors, 
lawyers and ministers, who aim, outside of the 
institutions of learning, toward real advancement 
of knowledge, and yet they form here, exactly as 
over there, such a small minority that they do not 
determine the character of the scholarship of the 
country, while in England and France they are its 
most important factor. Here, too, the work of 
the outsiders will be measured by the standards 
set by the universities. Every advantage and 
disadvantage, every reform and every danger for 
scholarship, is in America, therefore, as in Ger- 
many, first of all a university problem. 

To give to our inquiry narrower limits, I shall 
omit from consideration the law school, medical 



SCHOLARSHIP 87 

school, and divinity school. The law schools es- 
pecially are, on account o£ the differences of law, 
so absolutely unlike here and abroad that they 
may be totally eliminated. If we thus confine 
ourselves, on the whole, to the humanistic and sci- 
entific studies, to philology and history, economics 
and philosophy, literature and the fine arts, math- 
ematics and physics, biology and chemistry and 
geology, and so on, we compare similar mat- 
ters. And on this basis now arises the question 
at issue : Why has Germany's productive scholar- 
ship attained the power to mould the thoughts of 
the world, while America's, so far, has not ? Why 
are the German universities such fertile ground 
that in them even the smallest talent comes to 
flower, and the American universities such sterile 
ground that here often the finest energies are 
destined to wither ? 

II 

One reason offers itself at once : in Germany, 
the very idea of a university demands productive 
scholarship as the centre and primary interest of 
all university activity ; in America it is essentially 
an accessory element, a secondary factor, almost 
a luxury, which is tolerated, but never demanded 
as a condition. But this fact itself has deeper 
reasons, and we must understand the whole spirit 



88 AMERICAN TRAITS 

of the universities there and here to understand 
why it is so, and why it must be so under the 
conditions that obtain to-day. In Germany, the 
spirit of the university is absolutely different from 
that of the preceding stage, the gymnasium ; in 
America, the university work is mostly a continu- 
ation of the college work, without any essential 
qualitative difference. The postgraduate work is 
more difficult than the undergraduate work, the 
teachers are expected to know more, the subjects 
are more advanced and specialized; but all the 
changes are of quantitative character, and there 
is nothing new in principle. The university is 
a more difficult college, — a college which presup- 
poses a greater amount of information, and where 
the best informed teachers of the country are 
teaching ; but its spirit is on the whole the col- 
lege spirit, merely on a more elaborate scale of 
instruction. 

In Germany, there is no greater difference than 
exists between the spirit of the university period 
and that of the school tune. The gymnasium fur- 
nishes education and information ; the university 
brings to the younger generation the scholarly, 
scientific spirit. The gymnasium distributes the 
knowledge which has been collected ; the univer- 
sity teaches the student to take a critical attitude 
toward all collected knowledge. The gymnasium 



SCHOLARSHIP 89 

teaches facts and demands text-books ; the univer- 
sity teaches method and presupposes all that can 
be found in books by independent study. The 
g3rmnasium gives to the boy of nineteen nothing 
different in principle from what the boy of nine 
receives; the university offers to the student of 
twenty something absolutely different from what 
he received a year before. The teacher of the 
gymnasium must, therefore, be a man who has 
learned a great deal, and has a talent for impart- 
ing what he has learned ; the teacher of the uni- 
versity must be a master of method. But there 
is only one test to prove that a man has mastered 
the methods of a science : he must have shown 
that he is able to advance it. The teacher of the 
university is, therefore, above all, a productive 
scholar, while to the gymnasium teacher produc- 
tive scholarship is something non-essential. 

This higher type of institution, this qualitatively 
new principle of instruction, has thus far not been 
completely realized in America. I am speak- 
ing, of course, of the ideal and of the theory. In 
practice, there are many German university pro- 
fessors whose lectures run down to mere school- 
teaching, and there are many brilliant American 
professors whose invaluable scholarly lectures and 
research courses are fully inspired by the highest 
university ideal. But while the former simply do 



90 AMERICAN TRAITS 

not fulfill their duty, and remain below the level 
of public expectation, the latter transcend the offi- 
cial and generally accepted ideal of university life. 
The official ideal of the American university is, as 
it has been expressed with emphasis, an institution 
in which " everybody can learn everything." And 
yet nothing is further removed than this from 
the ideal of that other university where n6t every 
one is admitted as a student, but only the one who 
has reached a maturity in which he can go over 
from mere learning to criticism ; and where not 
everything is to be learned, but one thing alone, 
the highest intellectual grasp of the scholarly 
spirit. A young man who is mature enough to 
enter the university ought to be able to learn 
" everything " for himself ; but the method of 
dealing with anything, not as a fact, but as a 
problem, he can gain only from a master. The 
college may teach " things ; " the graduate school 
ought to teach the stating of problems. The 
college teaches dogmatically ; the graduate school 
ought to train in critical thinking. The college 
is for intellectual boys ; the university ought to 
be for intellectual manhood ; as the college makes 
the students dependent upon the authorities, 
while the university ought to teach them to be 
self-dependent, to stand on their own feet. 

This is the point where American intellectual 



SCHOLARSHIP 91 

culture betrays Its limitations : American institu- 
tions do not show sufficient insight into the funda- 
mental fact that the highest kind of knowledge is 
not wide, but self-dependent. Yes, Americans, 
who are so proud of their spirit of initiative and 
independence, too often overlook the fact that 
the highest independence of character can go 
hand in hand with the most slavish intellectual de- 
pendence, and that all which is merely " learned," 
all text-book information, all knowledge with- 
out mastery of method, is good for boys, but 
poor for intellectual men. And yet such a self- 
dependent attitude is never the result of a mere 
skeptical incredulity or of defiant contradiction 
of the authorities, but can be gained only by the 
fullest training in methodological criticism. No 
one, even in his special field, can really examine 
everything himself, but he is not self-dependent 
till he fully knows how to do it ; that is, till at 
least in one point he has proved to himself that he 
is able to go beyond all that mankind has hitherto 
known about it. If he is able to master the 
methods for one problem, then he has the power 
to do so for others ; he may now follow a leader, 
but he knows that he does not follow simply be- 
cause there is a chain on his leg which pulls him 
along. No amount of information can be substi- 
tuted for training, and a university course which 



92 AMERICAN TRAITS 

deals with the history of ten years from a really 
critical point of view is therefore more important 
than another which pictures a thousand years 
from a dogmatic standpoint. Self-dependence in 
knowledge thus never means ignoring the author- 
ities, and even in the natural sciences does not 
come from a direct appeal to Nature, as the science 
teachers of the schools too often believe. Nature 
answers always only those questions which we ask 
her ; and the whole history of science — that is, the 
authorities — must teach us first how to ask our 
questions of Nature. Self-dependence means the 
power to understand the authorities, and to deal 
with them critically. 

As I have said, the only possible teacher for 
this highest kind of intellectual activity must be 
a scholar who is himself a master of scientific 
method, and as such a master only is the produc- 
tive scholar tested. That is the reason why pro- 
ductive scholarship is the very informing spirit of 
German universities, and why no teacher is ever 
appointed as university docent who has not proved 
his power over methods by publications which 
have at some point advanced human knowledge. 
Productive scholarship will never reach a really 
high level in America till it becomes the inform- 
ing spirit of the American universities also; and 
it cannot be their spirit till the difference between 



SCHOLARSHIP 93 

the ideal of the university and the ideal of the 
college, between the critical and the dogmatic 
attitude in knowledge, is fully grasped by the 
community. As long as the university is essen- 
tially a better equipped college on a more elabo- 
rate scale, the appointment of university teachers 
must be determined by the same considerations 
that influence the usual choice of a college teacher. 
As it is, — given, of course, the moral qualities, 
— a man is sought who has learned much about 
his subject and is an ef&cient teacher. But 
whether he has produced anything of scholarly 
value is, on the whole, a secondary question. 

The situation in our colleges is similar to that 
in the German gymnasiums. The gymnasium 
teacher is not at all unproductive. Most of his 
productions, to be sure, are just as in the colleges 
here, merely text-books ; but many gymnasium 
teachers publish scholarly investigations, and as 
almost everv one has written his doctor's thesis, 
many go on with their productive university stud- 
ies ; some have pubHshed excellent books. And 
yet their publications are in a way their private 
affairs, not their official duty ; their professional 
work can be conceived as complete without any 
effort in that direction ; there are even principals 
of gymnasiums who look with a certain suspicion 
on the too productive teacher, because they are 



0A AMERICAN TRAITS 

afraid that he may neglect his class duties, or may 
raise the level of instruction too high for the pu- 
pils. But in any case, if productive scholarship 
were in the hands of these gymnasium teachers 
only, science and scholarship would be the same 
lukewarm affair that it is here in the hands of 
college men, — a professional luxury, relegated 
to the scarce leisure hours of an overworked man 
who has little to gain from it, and whose career 
and professional standing are hardly influenced 
thereby. 

How different the university man, if university 
instruction is rightly understood as the teaching 
of method, of criticism, of self-dependence ! What 
other way is open to prove the possession of a 
power than the use — and the successful use — of 
it ? A singer who does not sing, a painter who 
does not paint, and a university scholar who does 
not advance human knowledge, stand then on ex- 
actly the same level. Of course it is not neces- 
sary that the productive work should appear 
directly under the name of the author ; here, as 
in Germany, some of the finest scholars put forth 
their thoughts through the publications of their 
advanced students, for whose work they take the 
responsibility. But if the instructor does not pub- 
lish in one way or another, directly or indirectly, 
theoretical assurances will not sufiice. To say 



SCHOLARSHIP 95 

that a man might have advanced human know- 
ledge, if he had not preferred to give all his time 
to teaching by lectures or by popular books and 
articles, is absurd, if he never had an opportunity 
to be tried. He might just as well say that he 
would have been skilKul in walking the tight rope, 
if he had not preferred his life long to walk on 
the floor. The fact that he is a good teacher 
has, of course, no bearing on the point. If we 
want to find a man who is a master of critical 
methods, we cannot be satisfied if the man shows 
that he has much information, and skill in im- 
parting it. For that we need the original mind, 
while the merely imitative thinker may make a 
most excellent teacher. Any one who has a per- 
sonality, a forcible way of presentation, and an 
average intellect will be able to be a fine teacher 
of any subject at six weeks' notice. The student 
cannot judge whether the thoughts brought for- 
ward in the lecture are the instructor's own 
thoughts or a rehash of the contents of half a 
dozen text-books; or even if they are his own 
thoughts, whether they have any legs to stand on. 
Whether the teacher's thoughts are cheap repro- 
ductions or valuable critical studies can be deter- 
mined only by a jury of his peers, and the only 
way to communicate with them is by publications. 
The teacher's papers and books alone decide 



96 AMERICAN TRAITS 

whether he is or is not in possession of that power 
of scholarly grasp which the university student 
is to learn from him, and thus whether he is or is 
not fit to be a university teacher. 

Ill 

No one ought to interpret this to mean a lack 
of appreciation for the receptive scholarship and 
the fine teaching qualities of a good college in- 
structor who wants to be a teacher only, or a 
writer of pleasant and helpful popular books. I 
do not at all claim that his function is less noble, 
or that his achievement is less important for the 
community, and I know, of course, that " distri- 
bution " of knowledge is not at all an easy or a 
mechanical task when it is well done ; the really 
good teacher needs many gifts and qualities which 
may be absent in great scholars. I maintain 
merely that the two professions are different, — 
as different as that of the photographer from that 
of the artist. A good photographer is certainly 
a more useful being than a bad artist ; but no 
photographer understands the meaning of art who 
thinks that he and Sargent are in principle doing 
the same thing. As long as. productive scholar- 
ship is not recognized by the public consciousness 
as something absolutely different from receptive 
scholarship, its development must remain an acci- 



SCHOLARSHIP 97 

dental one, and can never reach the level which 
American civilization has reached in so many 
other directions, and which might be expected 
from the large external resources of the higher 
institutions of learning. That the outcome in 
important work is disappointing, no one can deny ; 
nor will any one seriously doubt that the igno- 
rance of Europe in regard to American work will 
disappear rapidly as soon as really fundamental 
work is done. As soon as a Darwin or a Helm- 
holtz, a Virchow or a Bunsen, a Spencer or a Pas- 
teur or a Mommsen speaks in the smallest New 
England college, the whole world will find him out 
and listen ; but he must speak, as his European 
colleagues have spoken, in the service of produc- 
tive scholarship only, while he will remain unheard 
if he follows the leadings of his surroundings, 
becomes merely a good teacher, writes text-books 
and magazine essays and popular lectures. 

There is another point on which I must not be 
misunderstood. In Germany, the gymnasium, as 
the place of receptive scholarship, and the uni- 
versity, as the place where the productive scholar 
teaches critical method, are sharply separated. I 
do not mean that this external separation is in 
itself necessary, or, under American conditions, 
either desirable or possible. Such a complete sep- 
aration can be made only where the government 



98 AMERICAN TRAITS 

guarantees an equality of standard, and where con- 
ditions are equal throughout the land. In the 
United States, the system of sliding scales, of in- 
finitesimal differences, of transitions from low 
forms to higher ones without sharp lines of 
demarcation, has shown itself to be the soundest 
in all educational matters; the smallest institu- 
tion must have the possibility of growing up to 
the highest requirements, and each local founda- 
tion must be able to adapt itself to special needs. 
In a country where the greatest educational pro- 
gress comes through private initiative and through 
the slow raising of the standards of requirements 
in the social consciousness, the system of sliding 
transitions offers the best chance for healthful 
development; and the raising of the graduate 
schools to the plane of real universities can come 
only as the fruit of such a system, just as the 
present graduate school has developed itself nat- 
urally by that system out of the average college. 
What is necessary is only the development of the 
new ideal in the social mind. On the other hand, 
so long as the real principle is not acknowledged, 
the mere imitation of external forms or the arti- 
ficial construction of new schemes cannot bring 
about an improvement. For instance, the drop- 
ping of the college department represents no 
progress at all, if the remainder is in itself on no 



SCHOLARSHIP 99 

higher level than the average graduate school. 
The claim of an institution that it is in the lead 
because it has no college is without basis as long 
as its teachers are in no way superior, as produc- 
tive scholars, to the average instructors of other 
universities. The omission of the lower forms is 
no gain, and has at present great disadvantages. 
I do not believe that the development of the 
highest forms is to be expected along this line. 
I remember I once saw in the far West two insig- 
nificant institutions in the same county. One 
called itself, modestly, a college; the other, a 
university. As I saw clearly that the university 
was lower in its standards of graduation, I asked 
the director about the designation ; and he 
answered that they called themselves a university 
because they were of so much higher grade than 
the neighboring college. I asked him in what 
respect they were of higher grade, as they had no 
graduate school, no law school, and no medical 
school. " No/' he said, " we have not all these, 
but we are higher because we have no prepara- 
tory school." 

The functions of the student stand, of course, 
in immediate relation to the functions of the 
instructor. If the instructor gives information, 
the student is expected to learn facts ; and he shows 
best by examinations whether or not he has sue- 



100 AMERICAN TRAITS 

ceeded. If the task of the instructor is to teach 
the method of scholarly criticism, the student 
aims at getting a scholarly grasp ; and whether or 
not he has succeeded he can prove only by show- 
ing that in one Httle point, at least, he can advance 
human knowledge. Original research then be- 
comes the backbone of his university work, and 
the pubHcation of a doctor's thesis its natural 
goal. This aspect of student's work grows 
among us from year to year, and yet it has not 
won sufficient strength to stand alone against all 
attacks. There are still institutions which do 
their research work as a concession to a doubtful 
fashion, imported from Germany, and necessary 
as an advertisement in the struggle of university 
competition ; there is still a majority which does 
not beHeve in it at all ; and there are still leading 
universities here which do not require the print- 
ing of the doctor's thesis. It is a very curious 
fact that the most effective argument brought for- 
ward here again and again, in the fight against 
the doctor's thesis, is the cheap scholarship of 
many of the German doctor-dissertations. At the 
basis of this there is a misunderstanding, as the 
German doctor's thesis cannot be compared with 
the American one. In Germany the doctor-exam- 
ination is, on the whole, a purely decorative affair 
for the gaining of a title which has not the slight- 



SCHOLARSHIP 101 

est consequence for the career of a man, but only 
the social value of a personal address. All open- 
ings to the career of teacher, as well as to that of 
lawyer or physician, are dependent on the very se- 
vere state examination, which shows clearly whether 
or not the candidate has acquired the scientific view 
of his subjects. The man who has passed the 
state examination may thus pass with a low mark 
the doctor-examination, even if he presents merely 
a hasty, superficial piece of research, just to sat- 
isfy traditional regulations. As the degree has 
no practical bearing, and as it is always given 
with one of four marks, there is no danger in 
sometimes letting the thesis work run down. In 
America, however, the doctor-examination is the 
one goal of the post-graduate studies; it is the 
one entrance gate to the best positions; and it 
has thus the function of the German doctorate 
together with that of the German state examina- 
tion. The small group of men for whom the doc- 
tor's degree in Germany has a practical bearing 
is the circle of those who enter the university 
career ; that is, those who seek to become privat- 
docents of a university, and not teachers of a 
gymnasium. The entrance on a university career 
is indeed dependent on the " doctor " only, and 
not on the state examination ; but for this pur- 
pose it is required to gain the doctor's degree 



102 AMERICAN TRAITS 

with one of the two highest marks, and no thesis 
which has been marked with siimma or mag7ia 
cum laude is of that cheap kind of unthinking 
research which is so often shown here as a dread- 
ful example. Only these excellent theses can thus 
be fairly compared with those in question for 
American universities, and they are certainly of a 
kind to encourage production and publication. 

But more than that. Even if the dissertations 
were in themselves valueless for human know- 
ledge, if they were unworthy of publication, if 
they were unnecessary as tests for the students, 
original research, with the goal of a definite 
special problem to be settled by really scientific 
methods, would continue to be nowhere more 
needed than here, as the one great stimulus which 
our graduates get to active scholarly interest. In 
Germany they find these incentives through all 
their lives, in a hundred forms ; here everything 
comes together to work in the other direction, 
and to keep men away from the really scien- 
tific attitude. The small tasks of original re- 
search of the students in the university time 
are the Httle fountains in the woods, whose waters 
unite in the brook which is seen by the world ; 
and only if they are plentiful will the brook ever 
become a river. It is well known that the beofin- 
nings of productive scholarship in this country, 



SCHOLARSHIP 103 

thirty or forty years ago, were due to those who 
came home from such research work in German uni- 
versities, and that these beginnings have been rein- 
forced and developed by the hundreds who have 
gone abroad for their studies during the last de- 
cades, till only recently the time has come when 
the American graduate can find the same oppor- 
tunities in the best American universities. These 
stimulations of the student time are the real influ- 
ences which will decide the future of American 
scholarship ; and whoever belittles the value and 
retards the development of the students' research 
and of the doctorate must understand that he is 
helping to destroy the real scholarship of the coun- 
try, or to make it dependent upon that of other 
nations. At present there seems no occasion to 
fear for the standard of the degree ; the standard 
is kept high, but the number of those who seek it 
is far too small. No one who intends to teach in 
a college, or even in a high school, ought to end 
his academic years before he has attained the 
degree. He has not, like the university teacher, 
to teach the methods of scholarship, and, there- 
fore, is under no necessity to lead the life of a pro- 
ductive scholar, but the spark of active scholarship 
must have touched him ; if he has remained 
throughout merely a receptive scholar, merely a 
good college boy, even with his Master of Arts, 
his teaching will be sterile drudgery. 



104 AMERICAN TRAITS 



IV 



I have said that after the student days every- 
thing militates against scholarly production, in 
this country ; that our young man enters into a 
world which does not care for his original work. 
No one can understand the conditions of produc- 
tive scholarship here who does not consider the 
path which our young scholar has to follow. I 
have at present in my psychological seminary at 
Harvard twenty-six advanced graduate students, 
— on the average better prepared for scholarly 
work than the members of a seminary in a Ger- 
man university, as the men here are more mature 
from their more advanced age, and as the stricter 
regulation of attendance and course-examinations 
has laid a larger basis of information. What can 
I now hope from these young men with regard to 
their chances of making use of their scholarly 
power in the next twenty years, compared with 
the chances which just such a set of young men 
would have in Germany ? Over there, the best 
of them, the more talented ones, the more am- 
bitious ones, and, I may at once add, the socially 
stronger ones would choose the career of produc- 
tive scholarship ; and while the majority would 
be satisfied to jog along the road of the gymna- 
sium teacher, doing the prescribed daily work, 



SCHOLARSHIP 105 

without any original effort, some would enter tlie 
university career as privat-docents. There might 
be only three or four in such a group who were 
ready to do so, but no instructor would feel dis- 
appointed if he knew that there was at least one 
among his students in whom the seed would bring 
fruit. Once admitted to the university as such 
privat-docents, they can teach as much as they 
want to, and, above all, can teach whatever they 
choose, even the most specialized topic in which 
they are interested ; they live in an academic 
atmosphere, devoted exclusively to productive 
thought, and so they wait till a vacancy of a pro- 
fessorship occurs, knowing that it will be filled 
by the man who has done the most valuable piece 
of scholarly work. Their whole ambition is thus 
directed toward the advancement of science. Of 
course the choice has to be made by men, and 
thus human prejudices and passions must enter. 
It is not always the best scholar who gets the 
place, — cliques and parties obscure the ideal 
there as everywhere ; but at least the principle is 
safe, and certainly a local candidate has no ad- 
vantage over any one else, for the outlook covers 
all docents who have entered the arena of schol- 
arly literature. And further, while in democratic 
America the appointments are made by the presi- 
dent and by the trustees of the institutions, with- 



106 AMERICAN TRAITS 

out the official cooperation of the faculty, in mon- 
archical Germany no government can appoint a 
professor who has not been proposed by the fac- 
ulty, — that is, by the professional scholars, who 
have no more important interest than that of 
keeping high, by their cooperation, the level of 
productive scholarship in their university. All 
the academic premiums await there the young 
scholar who develops his scientific powers, and 
thus the institution of docents becomes the real 
backbone of German university work. 

How different here ! Our young men, when 
they have left our research courses, some of them 
with a fresh Ph. D. degree in their pockets, have 
no other prospect before them than to enter into 
a college as instructors. I do not speak of those 
who choose another profession, become perhaps 
school superintendents or technical specialists; 
nor do I speak of those whose work was not satis- 
factory enough to secure them a college position, 
and who must be contented with lower school 
positions. I speak of the best, — those who get 
all our blessings in the form of superlative let- 
ters to teachers' agencies and college presidents. 
Even these are satisfied when they get decent in- 
structorships or assistant professorships in a col- 
lege ; and they are delighted if the college is by 
chance not too remote in the Southwest, and 



SCHOLARSHIP 107 

if it IS not so denominational that they have to 
sacrifice their convictions, and if it is not so deep 
in debt that half of the promised salary cannot be 
paid on time. Let us take, again, the best cases. 
A good man goes into a good college. We all 
know what he has to expect. 

He finds an abundance of work, which crushes 
by its quantity his good will to go on with schol- 
arly interests. The young man who has to con- 
duct twenty " recitations " a week, and to read 
hundreds of examination books, and to help on 
the administrative life of his place, begins by 
postponing his scientific work to the next year, 
and the year after next, when he shall be more 
accustomed to his duties. But after postponing 
it for a few years more his will becomes lame, his 
power rusty, his interest faded. The amount of 
work, however, seems to me the least important 
issue, and I think it a mistake to regard it as the 
chief obstacle to production. After all, the day 
has twenty-four hours, and the year has fifty-two 
weeks ; a young man with full vitality can carry 
a heavy burden. I have known men who taught 
more than twenty hours weekly, and yet consid- 
ered the teaching as filling the leisure hours be- 
tween the periods of real work, which was their 
scholarly production. Much more essential seems 
to me the quality of the duties. A young scholar 



108 AMERICAN TRAITS 

ought to devote himself to special problems, 
where he can really go to the sources : instead of 
that, our young instructor has to devote himself 
to the widest fields, where it is impossible to aim 
at anything but the most superficial acquaintance. 
The experienced master can remain scholarly even 
when he gives the general elementary courses ; 
the beginner, who has no chance ever to focus on 
one point, but must all the time teach merely the 
outlines of his subject, will quickly sink to a 
cheap undignified interpretation. At first he is 
troubled in his scholarly conscience, remembering 
the spirit of the graduate school ; but soon he 
grows accustomed to the prostitution of science, 
shame disappears, he gets to be satisfied with a 
method of thinking which makes his courses 
effective and his work easy, and the possibility of 
his own production fades out of sight. And he 
has plenty of excuses on his lips : the library of 
his college is so poor ; his small laboratory gives 
him no opportunity ; his salary is too meagre to 
let him buy books for himself. Above all, he 
wants to earn a little additional money. Schol- 
arly papers in scientific magazines are not paid 
for. But several convenient roads are open. 
He may write a short text-book ; as the students 
must buy it, the publisher can pay for it. Now 
the scholar knows that there is nothing more dif- 



SCHOLARSHIP 109 

ficult and nothing more easy than to write text- 
books. The great scholar, who has tried his 
power in scores of special investigations, may try, 
at the height of his work, to connect his thoughts 
about the whole field into one system, and to 
translate it into the simple terms of a book for 
beginners. That is the sort of text-book which 
helps the world, — nothing is more dif&cult and 
more noble ; every line written therein stands for 
pages. But if a beginner comes and adds to 
twenty text-books the twenty-first, it is scientific 
reporter work, enervating and ruinous for the 
scholarly seriousness of the author. Another 
way is that of popular lectures — preferably be- 
fore women's clubs — and articles for popular 
magazines. All that is poison for the beginner, 
who loses increasingly the power to discriminate 
between what is solid and what is for effect, as he 
moves away from the criticism of scholars, and 
addresses audiences which applaud every catchy 
phrase. 

Yet the young sufferer who has all these mo- 
tives as his conscious excuses, and who thinks that 
he could do original work if he had less lectur- 
ing and more money, is mostly unconscious of 
the strongest factor which pulls him down, as it is 
a negative factor, which is felt merely by com- 
parison with the situation abroad. This negative 



110 AMERICAN TRAITS 

factor is the absence of a decided premium upon 
scholarly production. If he is a fine man, with 
vitality, he wants to get on ; the safest way is to 
cHmb up in his own institution, since the possi- 
bility of being called to other places depends 
largely upon chance. But in any case here the 
advancements and the appointments are made 
almost without any reference to original produc- 
tion. The men who busy themselves with ad- 
ministrative troubles, who are favorites with the 
elementary students, who are pleasant speakers, 
who show themselves industrious by manufactur- 
ing books for class use, win the premiums in the 
competition. And all these are merely the ideal 
factors : there are plenty of factors the reverse of 
ideal working besides. Yes, with the exception of 
the leading universities, the young scholar sees 
productive work so lightly valued that he must 
consider it a very unsafe investment of energy ; 
and if his passionate zeal and ardent delight in 
searching out truth hold him fast to the path of 
scholarship, he feels dimly that he is damaging 
his chances with the trustees of his Httle college, 
and thus, in the majority of cases, working 
against his own interest. What can be expected 
from the productive output of a young generation 
laboring under such conditions, com^pared with 
the possibilities in Germany; where in the twenty- 



SCHOLARSHIP 111 

one universities more than seven hundred privat- 
docents are at present working, every one of whom 
adjusts his teaching to his pleasure, — perhaps 
one or two hours a week on a subject in which he 
is absorbed ; every one of whom has no other 
ambition, and really no other hope, than to draw 
the attention of the scholarly public to his schol- 
arly productions, knowing that he loses his chance 
for advancement if he indulges in superficiahties ? 
It is just on account of this period of trial which 
lies before our young doctors that it becomes so 
essential to require the printing of the doctor's 
thesis. That little printed sheet has once for all 
brought the beginner before the scholarly world ; 
and while his daily work belongs to his unappre- 
ciative surroundings, his intimate interests connect 
him in his lonely place with the great outer world 
of truth-seekers. He follows up the magazines to 
see the traces of his little publication, he remains 
interested to defend his budding theory, he goes on 
to develop the incomplete parts of it ; and thus 
his dissertation becomes the one thread which 
binds him in his days of instructorship to the 
ideals of his graduate-student time. 

But let us take for comparison the most favor- 
able case under our conditions. Our young man 
is vigorous and successful ; he becomes a professor 
in a real university after ten or twenty years. Is 



112 AIMERICAN TRAITS 

he there finally in an atmosphere where the 
greatest possible output of all that his energies 
allow is encouraged by the conditions of the insti- 
tution? Of course the situation is now more 
favorable for his serious work than in the small 
college, — the standard is much higher, the atmo- 
sphere more dignified ; the outer means for work, 
books, instruments, are plentiful ; advanced stu- 
dents are ready to follow him ; his teaching is 
reduced to a very reasonable amount, — perhaps 
one or two hours a day. Everything seems en- 
couraging, and yet he feels instinctively that the 
fullest stimulus which he had hoped for is even 
here not found ; he feels as if, under other condi- 
tions, more might be attained with his energies ; 
yes, even here it is as if he had to do his produc- 
tive work, in a way, against outer influences which 
pull him back. 

I return therewith to the point whence I started. 
Our friend who has successfully found his way 
from the little college to the university finds, per- 
haps with surprise, that, after all, here, too, at all 
decisive points, the college spirit overcomes the 
university spirit; that the whole academic com- 
munity is controlled by the ideal of the perfect 
distribution of knowledge, and not by respect 
for productive scholarship and the imparting of 
method. He sees that the vital forces here also 



SCHOLARSHIP 113 

are the good teachers, and not the great think- 
ers. He sees himself, perhaps^ in a faculty where 
real scholars mingle with men who have not the 
slightest ambition to advance human knowledge, 
but who have simply done on a great scale all 
that the men in his fresh- water college did on 
a narrow scale. He feels as if his productive 
scholarship were merely tolerated, or at least con- 
sidered unessential, as no one demands it from 
the others as an essential condition of their pre- 
sence. How surprised he is when he sees the 
alumni of the university meet, and listens to their 
speeches in praise of the alma mater ! He hears 
beautiful words about patriotism and liberal edu- 
cation, about athletics and gifts of money, about 
the glorious history and the gifted sons who have 
become men of pubHc affairs ; but that the univer- 
sity is a place for productive scholarship he does 
not hear mentioned. He had thought that the 
advances of human knowledge by the members of 
his university were the milestones in its history, 
like the battles which a regiment has fought ; he 
had thought that, as in Germany, the great schol- 
arly conquests of the members of the faculties 
were the common pride of the old students ; and 
now he sees that here, too, no one officially val- 
ues his cherished ideals. They still remain his 
private luxury, apart from human ambition and 



114 AMERICAN TRAITS 

social premiums. And his greatest disappoint- 
ment comes when he sees that even here the activ- 
ity of productive scholarship adjusts itself to the 
financial situation, apd that all the material con- 
ditions push the teachers away from productive 
scholarship just as- strongly in the large univer- 
sity as in the Httle college where the instructor 
was paid like a car conductor. 



Whenever in Greek-letter societies, among sol- 
emn speeches, some one makes an academic oration 
about the profession of the scholar, one feature 
is never forgotten : the scholar does not care for 
money. That sounds certainly very uplifting, 
but it seems hardly true to any one who sees how 
the great majority of American professors seek 
money-making opportunities that have a varnish 
of scholarship, but no pretense of scholarly aims. 
In a hundred forms, of course, the temptation 
comes, and by a hundred means does it creep into 
the scholar's Hfe, to absorb every hour of leisure 
which ought to belong to purely ideal pursuits. 
He will not do anything that will bring money, 
but he will do few things that bring no money ; 
and as the really scholarly books never bring any 
income, he deceives himself by all kinds of com- 
promises, — writes popular books here and arti- 



SCHOLARSHIP 115 

cles for an encyclopaedia there, makes schoolbooks 
and writes expert's testimonials, works in univer- 
sity extension and lectures before audiences whose 
judgment he despises. Some energetic men can 
stand all that without the shghtest injury to their 
higher work; for the greater number it means 
surrender as productive scholars. And yet it is 
all justified ; unjustified alone is the social situa- 
tion which forces upon a serious scholar such self- 
destructive activity, and unjustified is the procla- 
mation of the maxim that the scholar ought not to 
care for a better material fate. 

To be sure, it is most honorable in a scholar to 
accept such a situation in dignified silence ; but 
often, while it is bad to speak about a thing, it 
may be worse not to speak about it. It must be 
said in all frankness that a financial situation in 
which America's best scholars — that is, those 
who are called to instructorships of the leading 
universities — are so poorly * paid that they feel 
everywhere pushed into pursuits antagonistic to 
scholarship, thus crushing the spirit of produc- 
tive scholarship, is not only an undignified state 
of things, but one of the greatest dangers to the 
civilization of the country. The scholar is not to 
be reproached as a greedy materialist for yielding. 
As long as the present situation of scholarship 
holds, the overwhelming majority of those who 



116 AMERICAN TRAITS 

go into teaching will have only narrow private 
means, and yet they will seek a comfortable life, 
and they ought to seek it as a background for 
creative work. They do not envy the rich banker 
his yachts and horses and diamonds, but they want 
a home of aesthetic refinement, they want excellent 
education for their children, they want a library 
well supplied, they want pleasant social inter- 
course and refreshing summer life and comfort- 
able travel ; and they ought to have all that with- 
out doing more than their normal university 
teaching, being thus free to devote the essential 
part of their time and thought to the advance- 
ment of productive scholarship. Exactly that is 
the situation in Germany, and no similar freedom 
of mind can be reached here by the scholar if 
every university professor, called to his place for 
real university work, has not a salary which cor- 
responds to the income of the leading professors 
abroad. But to reproduce the benefits of the 
German situation and its influence on scientific 
production, it is not enough to raise the level of 
salaries ; it is, above all, desirable to stop the 
mechanical equality which exists here generally, 
and which shows most clearly that, administra- 
tively, the American university still stands fairly 
under the ideal of the old college type, where the 
schoolman reigns and the scholar is a stranger. 



SCHOLARSHIP 117 

The raising of the level of salaries may free the 
mind of the scholar from the search for opportu- 
nities to earn money, and thus from the corrupt- 
ing influence of pseudo-scholarly temptations, but 
it is clearly a negative factor only ; the inequality 
of salaries is a positive stimulus, provided that the 
highest salaries are really given to secure the ser- 
vices of the greatest scholars. In Germany, it 
not seldom happens that the income of one mem- 
ber of the faculty is five times larger than that of 
a colleague. There the school-teachers of the 
gymnasium have equal salaries, and their income 
grows according to seniority. That is entirely 
suitable, and a college cannot do otherwise. But 
to apply that principle to the valuation of schol- 
arly production seems to the Germans not more 
logical than to fix the prices for all portrait paint- 
ers according to the square inches of their can- 
vas and their years of service. With them, many 
professors have much higher incomes than the 
highest officers of the state, who are their admin- 
istrative superiors. Germany would never have 
reached that leading position in scholarship which 
is hers if she had treated her scholars like clerks 
or school-teachers, for whom the demand and 
supply can regulate the price mechanically, be- 
cause the demand exists as a necessary one. The 
demand for higher scholarship has to be devel- 



Its AMERICAN TRAITS 

oped, and the supply has thus to be furthered 
beyond the present demand by a protective policy. 

But America needs to offer large, even very 
large salaries on still another ground. The free- 
ing of the scholar's mind from financial cares, and 
the stimulation of his productive energies, by a 
system which gives the highest rewards to the 
best scholarly work, the New World would share 
with the Old ; but there is a third reason, which 
holds for America alone. It is to my mind the 
most important ; and I confess that I should not 
have cared to touch the difficult salary problem 
at all if this point, which will decide the future 
of American scholarship, were not involved. We 
need high salaries, because at present they offer 
the only possible way to give slowly to productive 
scholarship social recognition and social stand- 
ing, and thus to draw the best men of the land. 
Without great social premiums America will never 
get first-rate men as rank and file in the uni- 
versity teaching staff ; and with second-rate men 
productive scholarship which is really productive 
for the world can never be created. 

The greater number of those who devote them- 
selves to higher teaching in America are young 
men without means, too often, also, without 
breeding ; and yet that would be easily compen- 
sated for if they were men of the best minds, but 



SCHOLARSHIP 119 

they are not. They are mostly men with a 
passive, almost indifferent sort of mind, without 
intellectual energy, men who see in the academic 
career a modest, safe path of Hfe, — exactly the 
kind of men who in Germany become gymnasium 
teachers. But those who in Germany become 
docents of the university are for the most part of 
the opposite type ; they are, on the whole, the 
best human material which the country has. 
They come mostly from well-to-do families, and 
seek the career because they feel the productive 
mental energy and the ambition to try their 
chances in a field of honor. Indeed, while the 
profession of the gymnasium teacher stands in the 
social estimation of the German below that of the 
lawyer and the physician, the banker and the 
wholesale merchant, the high respect of the Ger- 
man for productive science and art brings it about 
that the profession of the university teacher, to- 
gether with the aristocratic professions of officer 
and diplomat, stands as the most highly esteemed 
socially. Titles and decorations, as symbolic 
forms of public appreciation, add another to the 
outer stimulants to the greatest efforts. Thus the 
social honor of the career, the large income, and, 
above all, the delights of a life devoted purely to 
the clean enjoyment of production, work together 
to draw into the nets of the universities the very 



120 AMERICAN TRAITS 

best human material ; and as, after all, personality 
is everywhere the decisive factor, the high quahty 
of this human material secures the immense suc- 
cess of the work. 

Nothing similar stands as yet as a temptation 
before the mind of the young American, and it 
would be to io^nore the nature of man to believe 
that while all social premiums, all incentives for 
ambition and hopes, are absent, a merely theoret- 
ical interest will turn the youth to a kind of life 
which offers so little attraction. Can we really 
expect many brilliant young men of good families 
to enter a career which will for years demand 
from them superficial teaching in the atmosphere 
of a little college, with no hope, even in the case 
of highest success, of a salary equal to the income 
of a mediocre lawyer, and in a professional atmo- 
sphere in which the spirit of scholarly interest 
is suppressed by the spirit of school education ? 
Our best young men must rush to law and bank- 
ing, and what not. The type of man who in 
Germany goes into the university career is in 
this country the exception among the younger 
instructors. Those exceptions must become the 
rule before the whole level of production will be 
raised. As soon as the first-class men are drawn 
to it, no quantity of work will harm them ; men 
of that stamp have the vitality to do first-class 



SCHOLARSHIP 121 

work under any circumstances. America cannot 
bring it about by means of decorations and titles, 
and, as in England, baronetcies ; and it cannot 
start with social prestige, as social prestige is 
naturally only a consequence of first-class work 
and of the participation of first-class men. High 
salaries are, therefore, at present, the only means 
which the country has at its disposal. 

I well remember a long conversation which I 
had with one of the best EngHsh scholars, who 
came over here to lecture when I had been only 
a short time in the country, and was without ex- 
perience in American academic affairs. We spoke 
about the disappointingly low level of American 
scholarship, and he said : " America will not have 
first-class scholarship, in the sense in which Ger- 
many or England has it, till every professor in the 
leading universities has at least ten thousand dol- 
lars salary, and the best scholars receive twenty- 
five thousand dollars." I was distinctly shocked, 
and called it a pessimistic and materiahstic view. 
But he insisted : " No, the American is not anxious 
for the money itself ; but money is to him the 
measure of success, and therefore the career needs 
the backing of money to raise it to social respect 
and attractiveness, and to win over the finest 
minds." My English acquaintance did not con- 
vince me at that time, but the years have con- 



122 AMERICAN TRAITS 

vinced me : the years which have brought me into 
contact with hundreds of students and instructors 
in the whole land ; the years in which I have 
watched the development of some of the finest stu- 
dents, who hesitated long whether to follow their 
inclination toward scholarship, and who finally 
went into law or into business for the sake of the 
social premiums. 

As soon as the best men are attracted and ex- 
cellent work is really done, the development will 
be a natural one. On the one hand, the commu- 
nity will begin to understand the great meaning 
of productive scholarship, and its world-wide dif- 
ference from receptive and distributing scholar- 
ship ; university work will thus get its social re- 
cognition, and the ambition to be a productive 
scholar — not merely a pleasant author — will be 
the highest stimulus in itself, and will secure for 
all time the highest standard. Then, also, the 
question of salaries will become quite secondary. 
America has no difficulty in filling the positions 
of ambassadors, even though the expenses are not 
seldom three times greater than the salaries. In 
the same way, Germany would be able to fill its 
professorial chairs if they brought no salary at 
all ; the honor of the place rewards its holder, 
but at first this honor must be made clear to the 
community. On the other hand, as soon as the 



SCHOLARSHIP 123 

really best men go into the work, they must break 
that too narrow form which is the relic of an un- 
productive past : teaching in a college cannot be 
then any longer the necessary preparation for a 
real university position. Something like the Ger- 
man institution of the docent, which keeps the 
young scholar from the beginning in the large 
university, with work according to his own taste, 
must become the rule. That would brino^ second- 
ary changes in the administration, which would 
make the difference between college and university 
still more marked. The graduate school would be- 
come more and more the place for real intellectual 
independence, and reinforcing in the university 
teachers the spirit of scholarly production. And 
this, again, would set higher standards for those 
college teachers who feel the stimulus to creative 
scholarship ; as candidates for the university pro- 
fessorships, these men would stand in line with the 
docents, as every vacant chair would be filled by 
the author of the most important contributions to 
human knowledge. Thus a mutual stimulation 
would bring about a new academic situation, in 
which American scholarship would become equal 
to the best European production ; but that con- 
dition can never be reached as long as the univer- 
sity keeps up artificially the forms and the spirit 
of the college. 



124 AMERICAN TRAITS 

Of course all such cousiderations lose tlieir 
power and meaning as soon as the end and purpose 
is contested. Whoever imagines that productive 
scholarship is a kind of dreamy idleness, which is 
of no use for a busy nation, can have no interest 
in anything which goes beyond a liberal education, 
and he will be quite willing to import from Europe 
the material of new thoughts for that liberal edu- 
cation. This is not the place to repeat all the 
commonplaces which point out the utter absurdity 
of such a view. I do not care to demonstrate here 
that even material welfare, industry, and commerce 
and war, health and wealth, are from year to year 
increasingly dependent upon the quiet work of 
scholars and scientists, — work done without direct 
practical aim, done merely for the honor of truth. 
And still less do I desire to enter upon sounding 
declarations that the real civilization of a nation 
is expressed, not by its material achievements, but 
by the energies which are working in it toward the 
moral life and the search for truth and the creation 
of beauty. I have spoken here only to those who 
agree that America must not stand behind any 
nation in its real productive scholarship, in its 
intellectual creation, in its power to mould the 
thoughts of the world. 

The only sound objection seems the familiar one 
that Americans have no talent for scholarship. 



SCHOLARSHIP 125 

It has been said that^ just as England has no great 
composer, America will never have a great scholar. 
I do not believe that. At the middle of the sev- 
enteenth century all the nations of Europe had 
great philosophers, — Bacon and Hobbes in Eng- 
land, Descartes and Malebranche in France, Gro- 
tius and Spinoza in Holland, Bruno and Cam- 
panella in Italy ; and only Germany had the 
reputation of having no talent for philosophy. 
It was just before Leibnitz appeared on the hori- 
zon, and Kant and Fichte and Hegel followed, 
and Germany became the centre of philosophy. 
As soon as the right conditions are given, here 
too new energies will rush to the foreground. In 
carefully watching, year after year, American stu- 
dents, I am fully convinced that their talent for 
productive scholarship is certainly not less than 
that of the best German students. Compared with 
them, our students have an inferior training in hard 
systematic work, as their secondary school edu- 
cation is usually inferior ; but I do not wish to 
touch again upon that dangerous chapter. And 
secondly, they have infinitely poorer chances for 
scholarly work in their future, as I have fully 
pointed out. With a more strenuous preparatory 
training behind them, and a more favorable oppor- 
tunity for productive work before them, these stu- 
dents would be the noblest material from which 
to develop American scholarship. 



128 AMERICAN TRAITS 

And I gain my strongest conviction and belief in 
American scholarship from my admiration for all 
that the scholars of the past and of the present 
have done. Indeed, it is with enthusiasm that 
I look upon the personal achievements in schol- 
arship all over the land. Not only in Harvard, 
where I see the memory of noble scholars like 
Agassiz and Peirce, Gray and Child, honored and 
imitated, and where in my own philosophical de- 
partment colleagues of eminent creative power set 
the standard ; no, in the most different universities, 
and often even in small colleges, I have admired 
the productiveness of brilliant scholars. Yet I 
have always felt instinctively how much more of 
lasting value these scores of scholars might have 
produced, had not all the social factors, all the 
external conditions, all the pubHc institutions and 
public moods, worked against them, and hindered 
and hampered their splendid work. Yes, I should 
not have expressed any of these considerations did 
I not hope that it will be clear to every one that 
all my criticism is directed merely against the sys- 
tem, and never against persons. American scholar- 
ship as a whole is so far weak, and not to be com- 
pared with America's achievements in technique 
and industry, in commerce and public education ; 
inferior even to its poetry and architecture. But 
it is merely because the institutions are undevel- 



SCHOLARSHIP 127 

oped ; the best musicians cannot play a symphony 
on a fiddle and a drum. Yet it is wonderful how 
much has been done in the last twenty years 
against and in spite of the pubHc spirit ; how 
much, after all, has been produced while every- 
thing was crushing the zeal for production. This 
fact, that America has accomplished something, 
even under the most adverse circumstances, 
strongly inspires the hope that it will do great 
things when once the circumstances shall be as 
favorable as they are in Germany ; that is, when 
the university work is by its aims clearly separated 
from the work of the lower college classes, when 
the calls to university chairs are made first of all 
with reference to scholarly production, when the 
young scholar has a chance to remain as docent 
from the beginning in advanced university work, 
and when the social side of the profession is so 
developed that it attracts the best men of the 
country. The development of the institutions, 
on the other hand, has been such a rapid one in 
the last years that certainly the hope is justified 
that the last step will soon be taken : the time is 
ripe for it. Then the universities will become the 
soul of the country, and productive scholarship 
will be the soul of the universities ; the best men 
will then enter into their service, and the produc- 
tive scholarship of the country will be gigantic 
in just proportion to its resources. 



IV 

WOMEN 

I 

XoT long ago. I had an enjoyable call from a 
young German whose purpose in crossing the 
ocean was to catch a glimpse of American life. 
Yery naturally we talked, as fellow countrymen 
do. of the impressions which the New World 
makes upon the foreigner who has just reached 
its shores. I asked him whether he kept a diary. 
He declared that he did not have time for that ; 
but he showed me a httle pocket registry in 
which he was accustomed, as a man of business, 
to enter his debits, credits, and doubtful accounts. 
Further on in it, he had instituted a similar reck- 
oning with America. He explained that this was 
the briefest way of grouping his impressions. I 
have forgotten the most of these, since the record 
was one of considerable length : but of the cred- 
its I remember distinctly such items as the parlor 
cars, oysters, waterfalls, shoes, autumn leaves, 
Hbraries, after-dinner speeches, the city of Bos- 
ton, the ice-cream, the hospitahty, the " Atlantic 



WOMEN 129 

Monthly/' etc. Then came the doubtful accounts : 
the newspapers, mince pies, millionaires, sleeping 
cars, furnaces, negroes, receptions, poets, the city 
of New York, etc., etc. And finally came the 
debits : monuments, politicians, boarding houses, 
the spring weather, servants, street cleaning, com- 
mittee meetings, pavements, sauces, and at least 
three pages more. But what impressed me most 
of all — and by reason of which the little book 
comes to my mind at this moment — was a simple 
" family division " that I found there : under the 
debits the children, under the doubtful accounts 
the men, and under the credits the women. 

It gave in so simple a formula what all of us 
had felt durino^ our first months in the New 
World ! We were all amazed at the pert and dis- 
respectful children, and we were all fascinated by 
the American women. Now and then arose in 
our souls, perhaps, a sHght suspicion as to whether 
these two things can really go together : it seems 
so much more natural to expect that a perfect 
woman will provide also for a perfect education 
of her children ; but whenever we met this woman 
herself, whenever we saw her and heard her, all 
skepticism faded away ; she was the perfection of 
Eve's sex. And one group always attracts our 
attention the most keenly, — the college bred 
woman. There are beautiful and brilHant and 



130 AMERICAN TRAITS 

clever and energetic women the world over, but 
the college girl is a new type to us, and, next to 
the twenty-four story buildings, nothing excites 
our curiosity more than the women who have 
their bachelor's degree. Some mingle with their 
curiosity certain objections on principle. They 
remember that the woman has some grains less of 
brain substance than the man, and that every 
woman who has learned Greek is considered a 
grotesque bluestocking. But even he who is 
most violently prejudiced is first reconciled, and 
then becomes enthusiastic in theory or married in 
practice. He wanders in vain through the col- 
leges to find the repulsive creature he expected, 
and the funny picture of the German comic 
papers changes slowly into an enchanting type 
by Gibson. And when he has made good use of 
his letters of introduction, and has met these new 
creations at closer range, has chatted with them 
before cosy open fires, has danced and bicycled 
and goKed with them, has seen their clubs and 
meetings and charities, — he finds himself dis- 
couragingly word-poor when he endeavors to 
describe, with his imperfect English, the impres- 
sion that has been made upon him ; he feels that 
his vocabulary is not sufficiently provided with 
complimentary epithets. The American woman 
is clever and ingenious and witty ; she is brilliant 



WOMEN 131 

and lively and strong ; she is charming and beau- 
tiful and noble ; she is generous and amiable and 
resolute ; she is energetic and practical, and yet 
idealistic and enthusiastic — indeed, what is she 
not? 

And when we are in our own country once 
more, we of course play the reformer, and join 
heartily the ranks of those who fight for the 
rights of women and for their higher education. 
I have myself stood in that line. Some years 
ago, — after my first visit to America, the pro- 
blem of women and the universities was much 
discussed in Germany, and about one hundred 
university professors were asked for their opin- 
ions, which were published in a volume entitled 
" The Academic Woman." And when I sat 
down to furnish my own contribution to this 
subject, there appeared before my grateful imagi- 
nation the lovely pictures of the college yards 
which I had seen from New England to Cahfor- 
nia; I saw once more the sedate library halls 
where the fair girls in light-colored gowns radi- 
ated joy and happiness ; I saw before me the Ivy 
procession of the Smith College students ; I saw 
again the most charming theatrical performance 
I have ever enjoyed, the Midsummer Night's 
Dream, given by Wellesley students on a spring 
day in the woods by the lake ; I saw once more 



132 AMERICAN TRAITS 

the eager students in cap and gown in front of 
Pembroke Hall, at Bryn Mawr, and I saw once 
more the Kadcliffe Philosophy Club, where we 
prolonged our discussions through so many de- 
lightful evenings. A German Wellesley and 
Bryn Mawr, I exclaimed, a German Smith and 
Vassar, — that is the pressing need of our father- 
land ! My enthusiastic article was reprinted and 
quoted in the discussions, up and down the land ; 
thus I found myself suddenly marching in line 
with the friends of woman's emancipation ; and 
I was proud that I — the first one in my German 
university to do so — had admitted women as 
regular students into my laboratory, years before 
I came to America. 

All that was long ago. I do not now see 
American life with the eyes of a newcomer. 
That does not mean that I to-day admire Ameri- 
can women less than before, nor does it mean 
that I falter in my hopes that Germany will ab- 
sorb American ideas in the realm of higher edu- 
cation for girls. All these feeHngs remain the 
same, and yet, since the surface view of the tour- 
ist has been replaced by insight into the deeper 
mechanism, my creed has changed. I believe to- 
day that it is no less important for America to be 
influenced by the German ideals of a woman's 
life than for Germany to learn from America. 



WOMEN 133 

Of course when I speak of German ideals, I do 
not mean that witless parody which decorates the 
speeches of woman suffragists. I mean the real 
German woman, who is to Americans who have a 
chance to come into full contact with German life 
mostly something of a surprise. They expected 
a slave or a doll, a narrow-minded creature with- 
out intelligence and interests, and now their ex- 
perience is like that of a lady from Boston, — if 
I may be allowed to make use of her home letter, 
— who finds that every woman with whom she 
becomes acquainted in Germany has her serious 
special interests ; that they are all quite other 
than she had imagined them. And what is much 
to the point, the Germany of to-day is not that of 
twenty years ago. The immense industrial devel- 
opment of the whole country, which has brought 
wealth and strength and fullness of life into the 
whole organism, and which has raised the stand- 
ard of social existence, has left no sphere of Ger- 
man Hfe untouched. 

The efforts of this new Germany in the in- 
terests of the woman have taken four different 
forms, — four tendencies which naturally hang 
together, but externally are sometimes even an- 
tagonistic. The first movement, which applies to 
the largest number of individuals, is that which 
tends to soften the hardships of the female wage- 



134 AMERICAN TRAITS 

earner, especially among the laborers. The sec- 
ond seeks to raise the character of the general 
education of girls in the higher classes. The 
third endeavors to open new sources of income 
to the better educated women of narrow circum- 
stances, and the fourth has as its aim the clearing 
of the way for women of special talent, that they 
may live out their genius for the good of human- 
ity. I have said that these impulses move partly 
in opposite directions ; to widen the horizon of 
the women of the higher classes and to prepare 
them for professional work means to draw them 
away from the hearth, while all the efforts in be- 
half of the women in the mills and shops tend to 
bring them again to the hearth of the home. 
The one group gave too much time to the mere 
household, in its narrowest sense ; the other group 
had too httle time for this. The progress in all 
four directions is almost a rapid one ; the legisla- 
tion in the interest, and for the protection, of 
working-women is a model for the world ; and — 
to point to the top of the pyramid — the conser- 
vative universities have opened wide their doors. 
Last winter 431 women were admitted to the 
University of Berlin alone. 

These four tendencies, which ought to remain 
clearly separated in every discussion, as the usual 
mixing of them brings confusion, have neverthe- 



WOMEN 135 

less a single background of principles. One of 
these, which sounds of course utterly common- 
place, is, that it must remain the central function 
of the woman to be wife and mother ; and the 
other is that public life and culture, including 
poHtics, public morahty, science, art, higher edu- 
cation, industry, commerce, law, literature, the 
newspaper, and the church, are produced, formed, 
and stamped by men. I do not mean that every 
woman, or even every man who works for wo- 
man's rights in Germany to-day is ready to ac- 
knowledge these two principles. The social-demo- 
cratic party, whose spokesman, Bebel, has written 
a most striking book on the woman, would reject 
these principles decidedly ; and whoever plunges 
into the Kterature of the more radical wing must 
hear at once that free love is the only decent rule, 
and that every blunder in civilization has come 
from the old-fashioned notion that men may med- 
dle with public affairs instead of trusting them 
to the judgment of women. But all these de- 
clamations have accomplished nothing ; they have 
not removed a single pebble from the path of the 
woman. Every tendency that strikes against 
those two fundamental principles of German con- 
viction has been paralyzed by the spirit of the 
country. It may be said, without exaggeration, 
that all the efforts towards the solution of the 



136 AMERICAN TRAITS 

woman question in Germany strengthen and re- 
inforce the family idea. .The only exceptions to 
this are the hberal provisions for the highest 
development of women of unusual talent; but 
genius must always be treated as an exception, 
and such exceptions have existed at all times. 
The few who take the doctor's degree, and who 
feel the mission for productive work in scholar- 
ship, can thus be set aside in the discussion, while 
the situation as a whole suggests most clearly the 
irregularity of such a vocation, and does not push 
the average woman into such a path. 

The three remaining movements alone have a 
typical value. But there cannot be the slightest 
doubt that all that tends to uplift the lot of the 
working-woman protects first the home as a whole 
in protecting the individual girl or wife or mother. 
The central endeavor is to give her time for the 
household cares, and for her functions as a mem- 
ber of the family. The higher education, on the 
other hand, in so far as it does not aim at the 
exceptional achievements of the highest scholar- 
ship, is almost wholly in Germany of a character 
to make the young women better fitted for mar- 
riage. That the average girl attains to the 
fulfillment of her hopes only in marriage is a 
practical dogma which finds in the wide masses 
there no doubters ; and that, in the better classes. 



WOMEN 137 

the education of the woman was for a long time so 
much inferior to that of the man that it seriously 
interfered with a deeper intellectual comradeship 
in married life, also cannot be denied. The suc- 
cessful efforts to raise the standard of female 
education, and to bring it nearer to the level of 
that of young men, has thus the tendency to give 
new attractiveness to the family Hfe, and to make 
the girl more marriageable. In the atmosphere of 
the present German social views, — others may call 
them prejudices, — these efforts do not contain 
the least factor that operates against the crystal- 
lization of households. The more the horizon of 
the man widens with the new wealth and expan- 
sion of the modern Germany, the more this ena- 
bles the girl, in the struggle for married existence, 
to bring into the home a richer intellectual life, 
for which the need was less felt in the more idyllic 
and provincial German homes of the past genera- 
tion. Finally, the increased opportunities for 
German women to earn their own living make not 
at all in the Fatherland against the establishment 
of the home. These opportunities lift, indeed, 
from many homes the burdens of misery, and 
make many empty and wasted lives useful ; but, 
under the existing conditions of public opinion, 
there is no fear that they will ever have any 
chances as substitutes for marriage. They re- 



138 AMERICAN TRAITS 

main, for the large masses, necessarily the second 
best choice ; a question, on the whole, merely for 
those who have had no chance to marry, or who 
are afraid that they will not marry, or who hope 
that it will somehow help them to marry. In Ger- 
many, where the female sex outnumbers the male 
in such a high degree, and where, besides, about 
ten per cent of the men prefer to stay in their 
bachelor quarters, a milHon women have to seek 
other spheres than that of the wife ; but no aver- 
age German girl desires to be one of that million, 
even did the new opportunities that are constantly 
opening up offer a little better salary than is the 
case to-day. And, finally, does any one who has 
obtained even a glimpse of German civilization 
need any further proof that the whole public 
culture there is stamped by man's mind? No 
reasonable German considers the function of wo- 
man in the social organism less important or less 
noble than that of man, but the public questions 
he wishes to have settled by men. Man sets the 
standard in every public discussion, for poHtics and 
civil life, for science and scholarship, for educa- 
tion and religion, for law and medicine, for com- 
merce and industry, and even for art and litera- 
ture. Women are faithful helpers there in some 
lines, — they assist and disseminate, and in art and 
literature their work may reach the highest level ; 



WOMEN 139 

but the landmarks for every development are set 
by men, and all this will outlast even the most 
energetic movements for the higher education of 
woman, unless the whole structure of German 
ideals becomes disorganized. 

II 

In both respects, in relation to the home and in 
relation to the standards of public culture, the 
movements in the interest of women have in 
America exactly the opposite tendency from those 
in Germany ; even the same facts have, under the 
different social conditions, an absolutely different 
meaning : the whole situation here militates against 
the home and against the mascuhne control of 
higher culture, and seems to me, therefore, antag- 
onistic to the health of the nation. I shall con- 
sider first the influence on the home. I am not so 
unfair as to deduce my conclusions from the radi= 
cal speeches of ill-balanced reformers, or from the 
experimental extravagances of social iconoclasts ; 
I do not speak of those who want to see the chil- 
dren brought up in government institutions from 
the first days of life, or of those who consider 
marriage as the only surviving slavery. No ; I 
do not think of dreams and revolutions ; I have 
the actual, present situation in mind, the facts as 
they are welcomed by the conservative population. 



140 AMERICAN TRAITS 

And yet, with this alone in mind, I feel convinced 
that serious forces are at work to undermine the 
home, and to antagonize the formation of families. 
Of course I will not warm up the old-fashioned 
argument, which is repeated so often in Europe, 
that the higher learning makes a girl awkward 
and ill-mannered, and that the man will never be 
drawn to such a bluestocking : I take for granted 
that no American girl loses in attractiveness by 
passing through a college, or through other 
forms of the higher and the highest education. 
But we have only to look at the case from the 
other side, and we shall find ourselves at once at 
the true source of the calamity. The woman has 
not become less attractive as regards marriage ; 
but has not marriage become less attractive to the 
woman ? and long before the freshman year did 
not the outer influences begin to impel in that 
direction ? does it not begin in every country 
school where the girls sit on the same bench with 
the boys, and discover, a long, long time too 
early, how stupid those boys are ? Coeducation, 
on the whole unknown in Germany, has many 
desirable features, — it strengthens the girls ; it 
refines the boys ; it creates a comradeship be- 
tween the two sexes which decreases sexual ten- 
sion in the years of development ; but these fac- 
tors make, at the same time, for an indifference 



WOMEN 141 

toward the other sex, toward a disillusionism, 
which must show in the end. The average Ger- 
man girl thinks, I am sorry to say, that she will 
marry any one who will not make her unhappy ; 
the ideal German girl thinks that she will marry 
only the man who will certainly make her happy ; 
the ideal American girl thinks that she can marry 
only the man without whom she will be unhappy ; 
and the average American girl approaches this 
standpoint with an alarming rapidity. Now, is 
not the last a much more ideal point of view ? 
does it not indicate a much nobler type of woman, 
— the one who will have no marriage but the 
most ideal one, as compared with the other, who 
in a romantic desire for marriage takes the first 
man who asks her ? But in this connection, I 
do not wish to approve or to criticise ; we may post- 
pone that until we have gathered a few more facts 
and motives. Coeducation is only one ; a whole 
corona of motives surrounds it. 

Coeducation means only equahty ; but the so- 
called higher education for girls means, under 
the conditions of the American life of to-day, de- 
cidedly not the equality, but the superiority of 
women. In Germany, even the best educated 
woman — with the exception once more of the 
few rare and ambitious scholars — feels her edu- 
cation inferior to that of the young man of the 



142 AMERICAN TRAITS 

same set, and thus inferior to the mental training 
of her probable husband. The foundations of 
his knowledge lie deeper, and the whole structure 
is built up in a more systematic way. This is 
true of every one who has passed through a 
g3rmnasium, and how much more is it true of 
those who have gone through the university ! 
Law, medicine, divinity, engineering, and the 
academic studies of the prospective teacher are in 
Germany all based essentially upon a scholarly 
training, and are thus, first of all, factors of gen- 
eral education, — powers to widen the horizon of 
the intellect. All this is less true in America : the 
lawyer, the physician, the teacher, the engineer, 
obtain excellent preparation for the profession : 
but in a lower degree his studies continue his 
general culture and education ; and the elective 
system allows him to anticipate the professional 
training even in college. And, on the other side, 
as for the business man who may have gone 
through college with a general education in view 
— how much, or, better, how little of his culture 
can be kept alive? Commerce and industry, 
finance and politics absorb him, and the beautiful 
college time becomes a dream; the intellectual 
energies, the factors of general culture, become 
rusty from disuse ; while she, the fortunate col- 
lege girl, remains in that atmosphere of mental 



WOMEN 143 

interests and inspiration, where the power she has 
gained remains fresh through contact with books. 
The men read newspapers, and, after a while, 
just when the time for marriage approaches, she 
is his superior, through and through, in intellec- 
tual refinement and spiritual standards. And all 
this we claim in the case of the man who has had 
a college education ; but the probability is very 
great that he has not had even that. The result 
is a marriage in which the woman looks down 
upon the culture of her husband; and, as the girl 
instinctively feels that it is torture to be the wife 
of a man whom she does not respect, she hesi- 
tates, and waits, and shrinks before the thought 
of entering upon a union that has so few charms. 
And can we overlook another side of the de- 
lightful college time ? No noise of the busthng 
world disturbed the peace of the college campus ; 
no social distinctions influenced the ideal balance 
of moral and intellectual and aesthetic energies : 
it was an artificial world in which our young 
friends hved during the most beautiful years of 
their lives. Can we be surprised that they instinc- 
tively desire to live on in this peculiar setting 
of the stage, with all its Bengal lights and its 
self-centred interests ? They feel almost uncon- 
sciously that all this changes when they marry, 
when they are mistresses of a household, — a sit- 



144 AMERICAN TRAITS 

uation which, perhaps, means narrowness and 
social limitation. They feel that it would be like 
an awakening from a lofty dream. There is no 
need to awake ; the hfe in the artificial setting of 
remote ideals can be continued, if they attach 
themselves, not to a husband and children, but to 
clubs and committees, to higher institutions and 
charity work, to art and literature ; if they re- 
main thus in a world where everything is so much 
more ideal than in that ungainly one in which 
children may have the whooping-cough. 

Of course all these are not motives that pro- 
hibit marriage ; they may not even, in any individ- 
ual case, work as conscious considerations ; they 
are only subconscious energies, which show their 
efPects merely if you consider the large groups ; 
they are the little forces, the accumulation of 
which pushes the balance of motives perhaps so 
httle that they remain unnoticed by the girl who 
is undecided whether to accept him; and yet they 
are ef&cient. 

The college studies do not merely widen the 
horizon ; they give to many a student a concrete 
scholarly interest, and that is, of course, still truer 
of the professional training. The woman who 
studies medicine or natural science, music or 
painting, perhaps even law or divinity, can we 
affront her with the suggestion, which would be 



WOMEN 145 

an insult to the man, that all her work is so su- 
perficial that she will not care for its continuation 
as soon as she undertakes the duties of a married 
woman? Or ought we to imply that she is so 
conceited as to believe that she is able to do what 
no man would dare hope for himself ; that is, to 
combine the professional duties of the man with 
the not less complex duties of the woman ? She 
knows that the intensity of her special interest 
must suffer ; that her work must become a super- 
ficial side-interest; that she has for it but rare 
leisure hours ; and no one can blame her, how- 
ever much she may love her own home, for loving 
still more the fascinating work for which she was 
trained. 

All these tendencies are now psychologically 
reinforced by other factors which have nothing 
to do with the higher education as such, but are 
characteristic of the situation of the woman in 
general. The American girl, well or carelessly 
educated, lives in the midst of social enjoyments, 
of cultured interests, of flirtations, and of refine- 
ments — what has she to hope at all from the 
change which marriage brings? Well, the one 
without whom her heart would break may have 
appeared — there is then no use of further discus- 
sion. But it is more probable that he has not 
appeared, while she, in the meanwhile, flirts with 



146 AMERICAN TRAITS 

half a dozen men, of whom one is so congenial, 
and another such a brilliant wit, and the third 
such a promising and clever fellow ; the fourth 
is rich, and the fifth she has known since her 
childhood, and the sixth, with the best chances, 
is such a dear, stupid little thing ! What has she 
really to gain from a revolution of her individual 
fate ? Is there anything open to her which was 
closed so far ? Between the social freedom of a 
German girl and a German wife there is not that 
gulf which separates the two groups, for instance, 
in France ; and yet the change from the single to 
the married hf e is an absolute one. Even in Ger- 
many, the joys of girlhood have something of the 
provisional in their character, like the temporary 
filhng of a time of preparation for the real life. 
In this country the opposite prevails. Every for- 
eigner sees with amazement the social liberty of 
the young girl, and admires no great American 
invention more than the unique system of the 
chaperon. He is thus hardly surprised that the 
American girl almost hides the fact when she be- 
comes engaged ; she has to give up so many fine 
things, — a period almost of resignation has to 
begin, and no new, untried social enjoyments are 
in view. 



WOMEN 147 

III 

But the American girl has not only no new 
powers to expect ; she has in marriage a positive 
function before her, which she, again unlike her 
European sister, considers, on the whole, a bur- 
den, — the care of the household. I do not mean 
that the German woman is enraptured with de- 
light at the prospect of scrubbing a floor ; and I 
know, of course, how many American women are 
model housekeepers, how the farmers' wives, espe- 
cially, have their pride in it, and how often spoiled 
girls heroically undertake housekeeping with nar- 
row means, and that, too, much more often than 
in Germany, without the help of servants. And 
yet, there remains a difference of general attitude 
which the social psychologist cannot overlook. 
The whole atmosphere is here filled with the con- 
scious or unconscious theory that housework is 
somewhat commonplace, a sort of necessary evil 
which ought to be reduced to a minimum. I do 
not ask whether that is not perhaps correct ; I 
insist only that this feeling is much stronger here 
than in Germany, and that it must thus work 
against domestic life. I point merely to a few 
symptoms of this phenomenon. I think, for in- 
stance, of the boarding-house life of married peo- 
ple, an anti-domestic custom which has such wide 



148 AMERICAN TRAITS 

extension in America, and which is not only un- 
known, but utterly inconceivable in Germany. 
But also where a house is kept, the outsider has 
the feeling that the young wife enjoys her home 
as the basis of family life and as a social back- 
ground, but that she is not trained to enjoy it 
as a field of domestic activity. The German 
girl anticipates, not as the smallest enjoyment of 
marriage, the possession of a household after her 
own domestic tastes, and according to her talent 
for housework. Her whole home education is a 
preparation for this, and here the German mo- 
ther finds a large share of her duties. All this 
may be, in a way, an unpractical scheme ; it may 
be wasted energy ; it may be better to learn those 
functions in a more mature age, in which the 
mind approaches them more theoretically; but 
this at least is certain, that the German way de- 
velops a more instinctive incHnation toward the 
home life. 

The general American tendency to consider 
housework as a kind of necessary evil, which as 
such cannot appeal to those who have free choice, 
is not less evident in the lower strata of the com- 
munity. The conviction of every American girl 
that it is dignified to work in the mill, but undig- 
nified to be a cook in any other family, would 
never have reached its present intensity if an 



WOMEN 149 

anti-domestic feeling were not in the background. 
Exactly the same tendency appears, therefore, 
when work for the parents is in question. The 
laborer's daughter has, of course, not such a com- 
plete theory as the banker's daughter ; but that 
it is dull to sit in the kitchen and look after the 
little sister, she too knows. In consequence, she 
also rushes to the outside life as saleswoman, as 
industrial laborer, as office worker : it is so excit- 
ing and interesting ; it is the richer life. The 
study of the special cases shows, of course, that 
there are innumerable factors involved ; but if 
we seek for the most striking features of woman's 
work, here and abroad, from a more general sur- 
vey of the subject, it would seem that the aim of 
the German woman is to further the interests of 
the household, and that of the American woman 
to escape from the household. 

Germany, with its very condensed population, 
was not able to do without the help of female 
muscle in running the economic machine ; Amer- 
ica, with its thin population and its great natural 
richness, does not really need this. In Germany 
almost a fourth of the women are at work; in 
America hardly more than a tenth. Above all, 
in Germany the women are doing the hard work, 
two and a half millions being engaged in agricul- 
ture against half a million here, of whom the 



150 AMERICAN TRAITS 

greater part are negroes. The condition of the 
country as a whole does not demand woman's 
aid ; man's labor can support the households of 
this country, and, economically, the country 
would be better off if female labor were almost 
entirely suppressed, both by prejudice and by in- 
stitutions, since it lowers the wages of the men, 
and wastes domestic energies which, in a more 
intensified effort, would save the more. If, in 
spite of these economic conditions, woman's labor, 
other than of a domestic character, has become a 
socially necessary factor, it must have been, first 
of all, because the American woman feels that it 
is easier to perform the labor of the man than to 
make an increased domestic effort. It is the dis- 
inclination to domestic cares that has slowly 
created the present situation, and this situation, 
itself, with its resulting distribution of wages, has 
necessarily the effect' of reinforcing this motive, 
and of pushing the woman from the hearth to 
the mill and the salesroom, the office and the 
classroom. 

I have mentioned merely mental factors which 
are to be taken into account in their subconscious 
cooperation against family life ; but the mental 
strain and excitement to w^hich young girls are 
subjected, and the lack of social restraint, the 
constant hurry, and, above all, the intellectual 



WOMEN 151 

over-tension must influence the nervous system, 
and the nervous system must influence the whole 
organization of that sex which nature, after all, 
has made the weaker one. The foreigner cannot 
see these charming American girls without a con- 
stant feeling that there is something unhealthy in 
their nervous make-up, an over-irritation, a patho- 
logical tension, not desirable for the woman who 
is preparing herself to be the mother of healthy 
children. The vital statistics tell the whole story. 
The census of 1890 showed that there were born 
per thousand of the whole population in Prussia 
36.6, in Massachusetts 21.5 ; and this diminished 
birth rate is still much lower in the native fami- 
lies here than in those of foreign birth, — the 
Irish or Swedish or German. 

If we will consider this social background, this 
general social situation, we shall perhaps see the 
problem of higher education from another point 
of view ; we shall begin to feel that under these 
conditions, which in themselves work so clearly 
against the home, it must be doubly dangerous 
to reinforce those tendencies in woman's higher 
education which, as such, impel toward a celi- 
bacy of spirit; and we foreigners ask ourselves 
then instinctively, " Is the woman question really 
solved here in the most ideal way ? " 

The answer which every one of my American 



152 AMERICAN TRAITS 

friends, male and female, has ready on his lips is 
very simple. Can you deny, they ask, that the 
woman whom you accuse is a higher type of hu- 
man being than any other ? Do you want her to 
be untrue to her ideals, to seek marriage just for 
marriage's sake, instead of waiting for the man 
of her higher hopes ? But such answers do not 
help me at all. It may be that I am willing to 
concede that place of honor to the individual girl 
here, in comparison with the girl of other nations, 
but the real problem cannot be even approached 
as long as the individual is in question. Here 
hes the point where, according to German con- 
victions, the shortcomings of American civiliza- 
tion arise : to the American mind the community 
is a multitude of individuals, to the German 
mind it is above all a unity. The American sees 
in the state an accumulation of elements of which 
each ought to be as perfect as possible ; the Ger- 
man sees in it an organism in which each element 
ideally fulfills its role, only in so far as it adjusts 
itself to the welfare and perfection of the whole. 
It is the atomistic idea of the community as 
against the organic one ; the naturalistic aspect 
as against the historical ; the state as a sandhill 
where every grain is independent of every other, 
against the state as a living being where every 
cell is in internal connection with every other. 



WOMEN 153 

If It were really the goal of civilization to inspire 
the individuals that are now alive with as high 
aims as possible, the American system would be, 
at least with regard to the women, an ideal one ; 
but if, to mention at first this single point, such 
a system works against the creation of substitutes 
for the individuals who have outlived their life, 
and thus destroys in the nation the power of re- 
juvenation, it is clear that the goal was wrongly 
chosen, and that the standard of perfection can- 
not be made dependent merely upon personal 
achievement. 

Indeed, not the slightest reproach attaches to 
the individual girl who does not wish to marry 
because her education and her social surround- 
ings have given her ideals which she can fulfill 
only in celibacy ; she stands individually much 
higher than the other, who with the same views 
of life nevertheless marries, and perhaps becomes 
untrue to her ideals, sacrificing her lofty scholarly 
ambitions for mere idle comfort. But the re- 
proach must be directed against the community 
which gives to the girls an education and an in- 
spiration which lead to such a conflict, and thus 
antagonize the natural energies of a healthy na- 
tion. Such a system is made according to an 
artificial ideal; there is in the world of experience 
no individual which rests and reposes in or on it- 



154 AMERICAN TRAITS 

self : the natural unity is the family. Every system 
of public spirit which in its final outcome raises the 
individuals, but lowers the families, is antagonis- 
tic to the true civilization of the people, and its 
individualistic, brilliant achievements are dearly 
bought illusions of success. No one will dare 
say to a woman. This is the best, but you, for 
one, ought to be satisfied with the second best. 
But we have the right to demand from the com- 
munity that the woman be taught to consider, as 
the really best for her, what is in the highest in- 
terests of the whole of society, even if it be sec- 
ond best for the individual. 

What can be done ? Is it necessary to lower 
the standard of woman's education in all levels of 
society in order to reinforce the family feeling ? 
Must we throw away all that is achieved for the 
seK-preservation of the race ? or is there possibly 
a way to maintain this glorious individual per- 
fection, and yet to serve the purposes of the or- 
ganic community ? But the answer to this prac- 
tical question may be postponed until we have 
considered, more briefly, the other factor to which 
I have already referred. I affirmed that in Ger- 
many all the movements in the field of the wo- 
man question are not only in harmony with, and in 
the interest of, the family, but that, above all, the 
whole public life bears, as a matter of course, the 



WOMEN 155 

stamp of the man. That is, in my opinion, the 
second great difference. The American system 
injures the national organism, not only because 
it antagonizes the family life, and thus diminishes 
the chances for the future bearers of the national 
civilization, but it has, secondly, the tendency to 
feminize the whole higher culture, and thus to in- 



jure 



the national civihzation itself. 



IV 



If I speak of public life here, I do not mean 
pohtics in the technical sense. The arguments 
for and against the participation of women in 
politics, the reasons for and against woman suf- 
fragej are certainly of a peculiar kind ; I have 
often listened to both sides in these discussions, 
and have always, as long as one side was pleading 
its cause, felt strongly in favor of the other side. 
If I am, on the whole, opposed to woman suffrage, 
it is because it belongs to those factors which we 
have discussed : it would help to draw the inter- 
ests of individual women away from domestic life. 
But I do not think that it would have a serious 
bearing on that point which we have now to con- 
sider, the effemination of public life. Politics 
would certainly be influenced as to its character 
if woman suffrage existed everywhere, — it would, 
in some ways, probably suffer through hysterical 



156 AMERICAN TRAITS 

sentimentality, illogical impulses, and the lack of 
consistent obedience to abstract law ; but it would 
probably be, on the other hand, in many respects 
ennobled and morahzed, softened and elevated. 
There would be, on the whole, no serious disad- 
vantage to be feared for political life itself, be- 
cause the men would always remain the backbone 
of the pohtical parties. Politics in America so 
immediately and directly penetrates man's whole 
welfare, his commerce and industry, his income 
and his expenses, his rights and his duty, that 
there is no danger that he would ever allow the 
political life to pass from his hands into those of 
the woman ; a real effeminizing of political life is 
thus no probable danger. Of course, so long as 
only four of the less developed States of the 
Union have introduced woman suffrage, the ques- 
tion is of no practical importance. 

The public life that I have in mind is the pub- 
lic expression of the ideal energies, the striving 
for truth and beauty, for morality and rehgion, 
for education and social reform, and their embod- 
iment, not in the home, but in the public con- 
sciousness. In Germany no one of these func- 
tions of public life is without the support and 
ennobling influence of active women, but decid- 
edly the real bulk of the work is done by men ; 
they alone give to it character and direction, and 



WOMEN 157 

their controlling influence gives to this whole 
manifoldness of national aims its strenuousness 
and unity ; to carry these into the milHons of 
homes and to make them living factors in the 
family, is the great task of the women there. 
Here, on the other hand, the women are the real 
supporters of the ideal endeavors : in not a few 
fields, their influence is the decisive one ; in all 
fields, this influence is felt, and the whole system 
tends ever more and more to push the men out 
and the women in. Theatre managers claim that 
eighty-five per cent, of their patrons are women. 
No one can doubt that the same percentage would 
hold for those who attend art exhibitions, and 
even for those who read magazines and literary 
works in general. And we might as well con- 
tinue with the same somewhat arbitrary figure : 
can we deny that there are about eighty-five per 
cent of women among those who attend public 
lectures, or who go to concerts, among tho^e who 
look after public charities and the work of the 
churches ? I do not remember ever to have been 
in a German art exhibition where at least half of 
those present were not men, but I do remember 
art exhibitions in Boston, New York, and Chicago 
where according to my actual count the men in 
the hall were less than five per cent of those pre- 
sent. As a matter of course, the patron deter- 



158 AMERICAN TRAITS 

mines the direction which the development will 
take. As the political reader is more responsible 
for the yellow press than is the editor, so all the 
non-political functions of public life must slowly 
take, under these conditions, the stamp of the 
feminine taste and type, which must have again 
the further effect of repelling man from it more 
and more. The result is an effemination of the 
higher culture, which is antagonistic to the devel- 
opment of a really representative national civiliza- 
tion, and which is not less unsound and onesided 
than the opposite extreme of certain Oriental na- 
tions, where the whole culture is man's work, and 
the woman a slave in the harem. 

The woman, and sometimes even the indolent 
man who wants to get rid of the responsibility of 
something he does not care about, says simply 
that this is all right. As the facts show — they 
argue — that the woman is not inferior in intel- 
lectual and aesthetic energies, not inferior in ear- 
nestness and enthusiasm, why not intrust her with 
the national culture, why not give her full charge 
of art and literature, education and science, moral- 
ity and religion — man has a sufficient number of 
other things to do. But it is simply not true, 
and cannot be made true by any dialectics, that 
the minds of man and woman are equal, and can 
be substituted the one for the other, without 



WOMEN 159 

changing the entire character of the mental pro- 
duct. It is not true that men and women can do 
the same work in every line. Earnestness cer- 
tainly the women have. However large the num- 
ber of those who may meet their public duties in 
a spirit of sport or amusement or ennui, the ma- 
jority take these duties seriously ; and the college 
girl especially comes home with a large amount 
of earnestness in the cause of reform and of the 
higher functions of the national life. The only 
misfortune is that earnestness alone is not physi- 
cal energy, that good will is not force, that devo- 
tion is not power. But her lack of physical 
power and strength would be less dangerous to 
the undertaking if her intellectual ability were 
equal to that of the man. But here the social 
psychologist can feel no shadow of a doubt that 
neither coeducation nor the equality of opportu- 
nities has done anything to eliminate those char- 
acteristic features of the female mind which are 
well known the world over, and which it is our 
blessing not to have lost. The laws of nature 
are stronger than the theories of men. 

To express the matter in a psychological for- 
mula, on which the observations of all times and all 
nations have agreed : in the female mind the con- 
tents of consciousness have the tendency to fuse 
into a unity, while they remain separated in the 



160 AMERICAN TRAITS 

man's mind. Both tendencies have their merits 
and their defects ; but, above all, they are differ- 
ent, and make women superior in some functions, 
and man superior in some others. The immediate 
outcome of that feminine mental type is woman's 
tact and aesthetic feeling, her instinctive insight, 
her enthusiasm, her sympathy, her natural wis- 
dom and morahty ; but, on the other side, also, 
her lack of clearness and logical consistency, her 
tendency to hasty generalization, her mixing of 
principles, her undervaluation of the abstract and 
of the absent, her lack of deliberation, her readi- 
ness to follow her feelings and emotions. Even 
these defects can beautify the private life, can 
make our social surroundings attractive, and 
soften and complete the strenuous, earnest, and 
consistent public activity of the man ; but they 
do not give the power to meet these public du- 
ties without man's harder logic. If the whole 
national civilization should receive the feminine 
stamp, it would become powerless and without 
decisive influence on the world's progress. 

On the surface, it seems otherwise. Every one 
thinks at once of some most talented women, 
whose training in strenuous thought is not infe- 
rior to that of men, and every one knows that 
our female students are as good scholars as the 
male ones. Those few exceptions I need not to 



WOMEN 161 

discuss here, — the genius is sid generis ; but the 
case of the female university students does not 
at all suggest to me a belief in their intellectual 
equahty with men. Certainly the average female 
student ranks as a pupil equal to the young man, 
but that does not exclude the fact that her 
achievements and his are profoundly different ; 
she is more studious, and thus balances certain 
undeniable shortcomings, and the subjects in 
which she excels are other than those in which 
he is most interested. Above all, — and here I 
touch an important point too much neglected, — 
the difference between the students appears rela- 
tively small here, because the historic develop- 
ment of the American college has brought it 
about that the whole higher study bears far too 
much the type of the feminine attitude towards 
scholarship ; and this is the reason why the schol- 
arly outcome has so far been on the whole unsat- 
isfactory. In Germany, the university professors 
who are opposed to the admission of women to 
the university take for granted that the women 
will be industrious and good pupils, but insist 
that they will lower the standard of the really 
scholarly work, because they will take, in accord- 
ance with the feminine mind, a passive, receptive, 
uncritical attitude toward knowledge, while the 
whole importance of German scholarly life lies in 



162 AMERICAN TRAITS 

its active criticism, its strength of research and 
inquiry. All that the German professors now 
fear from the intrusion of women was precisely 
the habitual, characteristic weakness of the Amer- 
ican college until a decade or two ago. These 
colleges were excellent as places for the distribu- 
tion of knowledge, but undeveloped as places of 
research ; they were controlled by a passive belief 
in intellectual authorities, but little prepared to 
advance the knowledge of the world ; in short, 
they took the receptive, feminine attitude — no 
wonder that the women could do as well as the 
men. But in recent time the American univer- 
sity strives with vigorous efforts toward the real- 
ization of the higher ideal ; the test of the ques- 
tion whether the dogmatic mind of the average 
woman will prove equal to that of the average 
man, in a place controlled by a spirit of critical 
research, has simply not been made so far. If I 
except the few rare talents, which have been left 
out of our discussion, since they do not require 
that systems be adjusted to them, I cannot say 
that I have gained the impression that the spirit 
of research would be safe in the hands of the 
woman. But what a calamity for the country 
if this great epoch in the life of the universi- 
ties were ruined by any concessions to the femi- 
nine type of thinking ! The nearer America ap- 



WOMEN 163 

proaches a state of university work that corre- 
sponds to the highest achievements of European 
universities, the more it develops real universities 
beyond the collegiate institutions for receptive 
study, the more the equality of the two sexes 
must disappear in them, — the more must they 
become, Hke the European institutions, places for 
men, where only the exceptional women of special 
talent can be welcomed, while the average woman 
must attend the woman's college with its receptive 
scholarship. If we keep up an artificial equality 
through the higher development of the present 
day, American intellectual work will be kept 
down by the women, and will never become a 
world power. 

How differently, when compared with that of 
men of the same class, the female mind works, we 
see daily around us when we turn our eyes from 
the educated level down toward the half -educated 
multitude. Here we are confronted with the wo- 
man who antagonizes serious medicine through 
her beHef in patent medicines and quackery, the 
woman who undermines moral philosophy through 
her rushing into spiritualism and every supersti- 
tion of the day, the woman who injures the pro- 
gress of thought and reform by running with 
hysterical zeal after every new fad and fashion 
introduced with a catchy phrase. A lack of re- 



164 AMERICAN TRAITS 

spect for really strenuous thought characterizes 
woman in general. Dilettantism is the key-note. 
The half-educated man is much more inclined to 
show an instinctive respect for trained thought, 
and to abstain from opinions where he is ignorant. 
But the half-educated woman cannot discriminate 
between the superficial and the profound, and, 
without the slightest hesitation, she effuses, hke a 
bit of gossip, her views on Greek art or on Dar- 
winism or on the human soul, between two spoon- 
fuls of ice-cream. Even that is almost refresh- 
ing as a softening supplement to the manly work 
of civilization, but it would be a misfortune if 
such a spirit were to gain the controlling influence. 
That such effemination makes alarming pro- 
gress is quickly seen if we watch the develop- 
ment of the teacher's profession. I have seldom 
the honor of agreeing with the pedagogical schol- 
ars of this country, but, on this point, it seems to 
me, we are all of the same opinion : the disap- 
pearance of the man from the classroom, not only 
of the lower schools, but even of the high schools, 
is distinctly alarming. The primary school is to- 
day absolutely monopolized by woman teachers, 
and in the high school they have the overwhelm- 
ing majority. The reason for this is clear : since 
the woman does not have to support a family, 
she can work for a smaller salary, and thus, as in 



WOMEN 165 

the mills the men tend more and more toward the 
places for which women are not strong enough, in 
the schools, too, female competition must, if no 
halt is called, bring down salaries to a point from 
which the supporter of the family must retreat. 
It would be, of course, in both cases better if 
the earnings were larger, and more men were thus 
enabled to support families, while in the school- 
room, as in the mill, the female competitor brings 
the earnings down to a point where the man is 
too poor to marry her, — a most regrettable state 
of affairs. But the economic side is here not 
so important as the effect on civilization. Even 
granting, what I am not at all ready to grant, 
that woman's work, preferred because it is cheaper 
to the community, is just as good as man's work, 
can it be without danger that the male youth of 
this country, up to the eighteenth year, is edu- 
cated by unmarried women ? Is it a point to be 
discussed at all that " nascent manhood requires 
for right development manly inspiration, direction, 
and control " ? Where will this end ? That very 
soon no male school-teacher of good quahty will 
survive is certain, but there is no reason to ex- 
pect that it will stop there. We have already 
to-day more than sixty per cent of girls among 
the upper high-school classes, and this dispropor- 
tion must increase. Must we not expect that in 



166 AMERICAN TRAITS 

the same way in which the last thirty years have 
handed the teacher's profession over to the wo- 
men, the next thirty years will put the ministry, 
the medical calling, and, finally the bar, also into 
her control ? To say that this is not to be feared 
because it has never happened anywhere before 
is no longer an argument, because this develop- 
ment of our schools is also new in the history of 
civilization. There was never before a nation 
that gave the education of the young into the 
hands of the lowest bidder. 



The comic papers prophesy alarming results for 
the man ; while the woman teaches and preaches 
and argues before the court, he will have to do 
the cooking, mending, and nursing at home. 
That is absurd. There is enough room for the 
development of man in the present direction. 
Commerce and industry, politics and war, will fur- 
nish no lack of opportunities for the employment 
of all his energies ; but one thing is certain : he 
will be a stranger to the higher culture of the 
nation. And this condition, in which the pro- 
fessional callings, the whole influence on the de- 
velopment of the younger generation, all art and 
science and morality and religion, come to be 
moulded and stamped by women, is precisely the 



WOMEN 167 

one which some call equality of the sexes ! The 
truth is evident, here as everywhere, that equality 
cannot be brought about artificially. To force 
equality always means merely shifting the inequal- 
ity from one region to another ; and if the primary 
inequality was the natural one, the artificial sub- 
stitute must be dangerous if it be more than a 
temporary condition. Nature cannot act other- 
wise, because nature cannot tolerate real equality. 
EquaHty means in the household of nature a 
wasted repetition of function ; equality, there- 
fore, represents everywhere the lower stage of the 
development, and has to go over into differentia- 
tion of functions. Nature cannot be dodged, and 
the growth of nations cannot escape natural laws. 
To say that man and woman must be equal de- 
mands a natural correction by bringing in the 
differentiation of function at some other point : 
you may decree equality to-day, but nature takes 
care that we shall have, in consequence, a new 
kind of inequality to-morrow. The nation has 
decreed that the differences of sex shall be ignored 
in education and in the choice of callings, and the 
outcome is a greater inequality than in any other 
country, an inequality in which men are turned 
out of the realms of higher culture. 

But as soon as we take the point of view 
of social philosophy, we understand at once the 



168 AMERICAN TRAITS 

deeper meaning of the whole phenomenon and its 
probable development. This cry for equality, 
with its necessary results in a new form of crass 
inequality, then manifests itself as a great scheme 
of nature in the interests of the conservation 
of the race, in keeping with the special condi- 
tions under which the nation has received its 
growth. Under the ordinary conditions, the ma- 
terial opening and settling of a country move 
parallel with the development of the inner cul- 
ture, and the man is thus able to meet the re- 
quirements of this twofold public task ; he gives 
his energies to the material and political necessi- 
ties so long as the mental and spiritual culture is 
low, and in proportion as he is freed from the 
rudimentary needs that pertain to the support of 
the nation, he turns to the inner culture, that of 
education and art, and so on, while the woman, 
at every stage, cares for the private life of the fam- 
ily. In America, this normal course was changed, 
because the material opening of the country, the 
unfolding of its natural resources, coincided with 
the possession of a most complex inner culture 
brought over from Europe ready-made, not grown 
of the soil. Hence a new division of labor had 
to be discovered to meet those material exigen- 
cies which demanded man's full energy and man's 
side-function, the work of the higher culture, 



WOMEN 169 

also. This side-function had to be assumed by 
the woman ; she had to care for the inner cul- 
ture of the nation, that the arms of the man might 
be free for the more immediate work, the settling 
of the continent, the political organization, and 
the development of the national wealth. This 
was, imder these unusual conditions, the only way 
of preserving and fostering the high European 
culture ; if women had not temporarily taken this 
function from man, it would have been wholly 
lost in the wear and tear of the commercial and 
political adolescence of the nation. It was, then, 
the special mission of the American woman to 
become the bearer of the higher, inherited culture 
of the nation by the artificial development of an 
intellectual superiority over the man. 

But if this be true, it is clear that such vicari- 
ous functioning must cease as soon as those two 
peculiar conditions should arise which manifestly 
exist at the present time. The first of these 
conditions is that this female superiority should 
reach a point where it begins to effeminate the 
higher culture, and where it becomes antagonistic 
to family life ; thus positively injuring the organ- 
ism of the race. The other condition is that the 
material establishment of the country should have 
attained its completion ; the ground mastered, the 
sources of national wealth sufficiently developed 



170 - AMERICAN TRAITS 

to allow room for man's effort in other directions. 
No doubt this condition also is fulfilled to-day, 
— the West is opened ; the whole continent is 
economically subjugated ; a net of transportation 
covers the whole land ; wealth abounds in a suffi- 
cient number of families, down to the second and 
third generations, to insure the building up of a 
leisure class ; and the time has come when the 
American man can take his share, like the Eu- 
ropean, in the spiritual culture of his country. 
If the American man will but turn his real ener- 
gies to the world of spiritual goods, then the two 
great evils which we have discussed will both be 
cured by the one remedy, and at one time, while 
the woman will not in any respect be the loser. 
If man takes the part that belongs to him in the 
higher culture, this, instead of being emasculated, 
will show that perfect blending of human ener- 
gies in which the strength of the man will be 
softened by pure womanhood, and, at the same 
time, the woman, who will feel the greater 
strength in the man of equal culture, will shrink 
no longer from marriage, and will feel attracted 
by that truer companionship in which the real 
labor is divided, the public function given to the 
man, the domestic function to the daughter and 
sister, to the wife and mother. That is the state 
at which we aim in Germany 3 much has still to 



WOMEN 171 

be done there to give to the average German wo- 
man the thorough education of the American ; 
but that will soon come. In any case, even the 
best training of the woman must support in Ger- 
many the family idea, and the man will continue 
to be the mainstay of the ideal culture. We Ger- 
mans feel sure that this will not be endangered, 
even if we fully imitate the splendid college life 
of American girls. Therefore, no one can sug- 
gest that woman's education in this country ought 
to take any steps backward ; all the glorious op- 
portunities must remain open, and only one prac- 
tical change must come in response to the urgent 
needs of our period : the American man must 
raise his level of general culture. In short, the 
woman's question is in this country, as ultimately 
perhaps everywhere, the man's question. Reform 
the man, and all the difficulties disappear. 

We know that in Paradise, Eve followed the 
seducing voice of the serpent, and ate the fruit 
from the tree of knowledge, and gave of it unto 
Adam. The college-bred Eve has no smaller 
longing for the apple of knowledge ; but the ser- 
pent has become modern, and his advice has 
grown more serpent-like than ever : " Eat of the 
apple, but give not unto Adam thereof." The 
Bible tells us that when they both ate, they were 
cast out from Paradise, but saved the race. How- 



172 AMERICAN TRAITS 

ever it may be with the modern paradise, the race 
will be saved only on the condition that Adam 
receive his share of the fruit. Listen not to the 
serpent, but divide the apple ! 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 



A German who has seen the world and tries to 
make his thinking free from the chance influences 
of his surroundings may easily ask himself whether 
it would not be most desirable that all nations 
should become republican democracies after the 
American model. If he does not ask the question 
himself, he is sure to be asked it by an American 
friend who happens not to agree with the last 
speech of the German Emperor, and who, there- 
fore, takes for granted that an educated German, 
outside of the reach of the German state-attorney, 
will frankly confess that monarchy is a mediaeval 
relic and that democracy alone is life. When one 
of my friends approached me the other day with 
such an inquiry, I was in a hurry, and my answer 
had to be short. I told him, first, that the achieve- 
ments of democratic America are not the achieve- 
ments of American democracy ; secondly, that 
democracy in itself has as many bad tendencies as 
good ones, and is thus not better than aristocracy ^ 



174 AMERICAN TRAITS 

thirdly, that the question whether democracy or 
aristocracy is better does not exist to-day ; fourthly, 
that Germany daily becomes more democratic, 
while America steadily grows aristocratic ; fifthly, 
that there is no difference between the two nations 
anyway. My friend insisted that my argument 
stood on the same level with the oath of the woman 
who was accused before the court of breaking a 
pot which she had borrowed from her neighbor, 
and who swore, first, that the pot was not broken 
when she returned it ; secondly, that the pot was 
broken when she borrowed it ; and, thirdly, that 
she had not borrowed the pot. Well, that may 
be ; but my haste alone was to blame, as I could 
not explain in the few words I had time for that de- 
mocracy can cover very different tendencies. Thus 
I promised, when I had leisure, to disentangle my 
twisted argument, and to illustrate, perhaps even 
to establish it. The following remarks are, as far 
as possible, a fulfillment of my promise, and they 
follow exactly the order of the argument. 

I must begin, therefore, with the inquiry 
whether the present civilization of America in its 
good and glorious features is to be considered as 
evidence in favor of democracy as against aristo- 
cracy, of republican institutions as against mon- 
archical. 

The eulogists and the critics of American de- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 175 

mocracy, nowadays, often make their enterprise 
quite easy by praising or attacking it for quali- 
ties which certainly belong to democratic Amer- 
ica, but which are not characteristic of American 
democracy. The trouble, of course, begins at the 
very outset, with the difficulty of defining what 
democracy really is. Democracy is equaHty ; and 
yet we are familiar with the argimient of those 
who insist that equaHty is a foreign and un-Amer- 
ican conception, and that American democracy is 
not equality, but liberty. Democracy is govern- 
ment by those who are governed ; but why, then, 
no woman suffrage in America? Democracy is 
government by majorities ; and yet a thousand 
people in the State of New York do not count, 
as voters for the Senate, more than a dozen in 
Nevada, and even the President may be chosen by 
a minority. Democracy means universal suffrage, 
and yet every constitutional monarchy in Europe 
is based on universal suffrage. Democracy is 
brotherhood, but those who know Eussia assure 
us that there is no more brotherly people than 
that of the Czar. A democracy is a republic ; 
and yet we hear that the American colony was 
already democratic before the Revolution, that 
England is, after all, to-day a democracy, and 
that France is pseudo-democratic only. 

It is easy to praise democracy in America if it 



176 AMERICAN TRAITS 

is contrasted merely with the demoralized aristo- 
cracy of the Louis Quatorze period. The only 
defect of the argument is that such an aristocracy 
does not exist anywhere to-day, and that every 
word of the eulogy thus fits, just as well, any other 
non-republican country. And it is easy to de- 
preciate American democracy if it be compared 
with an ideal construction of public life, which is 
nowhere realized under the most complex condi- 
tions of modern society. The criticism, again, 
can be turned against any other country where, 
under different forms, the defects of modern cul- 
ture and the weaknesses of himian character bring 
about similar evils. It happens easily that the 
American puts into the ledger of democracy too 
many items which simply belong to the times in 
which we live. 

The unfairness of such a substitution is felt 
most strongly when America is compared with 
Germany. Germany has become in the hterature 
of democracy the most convenient object of de- 
monstration for the difference between the New 
and the Old World system. Comparison with 
England leads too quickly to the sentiment that 
the monarchy is there merely decorative ; com- 
parison with France is dangerous, since France 
pretends to be a democracy hke America ; com- 
parison with Russia is out of the question, partly 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 177 

because Russian life is so little known in America, 
and partly because its political institutions seem 
to an American beneath discussion. Germany re- 
mains thus in the vast literature of the subject al- 
ways the one easiest to point to among the leading 
nations. The popular argument runs as follows : 
America has all these fine things ; America is a 
democracy ; Germany is not a democracy ; poor 
Germany, that cannot have all these fine things ! 
But Germany might very well have them, because 
they do not necessarily pertain to a democracy as 
such. It is thus, perhaps, natural to begin a study 
of American democracy by a comparison of the 
achievements usually claimed for this country with 
those of the German Empire, which, aS Mr. Brad- 
ford in his recent large work on " The Lesson of 
Popular Government," assures us, " is almost as 
much under military and imperial despotism as 
three centuries ago." 

It might be difficult to reach a general agree- 
ment on any proposed list of reasons for the pride 
and satisfaction and happiness that result from 
the public life of this wonderful country, but I 
have certainly nowhere found in the Hterature of 
the subject a more complete enumeration than in 
the noble essays of Charles W. Eliot, in his recent 
volume, "American Contributions to Civilization." 
If I understand him correctly. President Eliot dis- 



178 AMERICAN TRAITS 

tinguislies ten different features in our pubKc life, 
each one of which deserves the respect and the 
admiration of the world. Let us consider these 
features one by one, as compared with conditions 
in Germany. " The first and principal contribu- 
tion," says President Eliot, " is the advance made 
in the United States, not in theory only, but in 
practice, toward the abandonment of war as a 
means of settling disputes between nations, the 
substitution of discussion and arbitration, and the 
avoidance of armaments." That was written in 
1896. But it is to the credit of England and 
not to that of America that the Venezuela conflict 
did not lead to war in that same year. And 
since those days we have gone to Cuba, we have 
gone to the Philippines, and, worse than all, we 
have heard through the whole scale, from the 
editorials of the yellow press to the orations of 
leading senators, the voice of that aggressive 
temper which waits for an opportunity to show 
American superiority to the world by battles and 
not by arbitration. Germany, on the other hand, 
has now kept the peace for thirty years, peace in 
a time which was filled to overflowing with inter- 
national irritations, peace which was paid for 
with immense expenditures, a peace that almost 
no one dared to hope for, and which was cer- 
tainly not a product of chance, but the result of 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 179 

most persistent efforts — it may be added in the 
same breath, efforts on the part of the government 
much more than on the part of the people, since 
in all Europe times have so fully changed that 
princes are much more peaceably inclined than 
nations. 

"The second eminent contribution which the 
United States/' according to President Eliot, " have 
made to civilization is their thorough acceptance, 
in theory and in practice, of the widest religious 
toleration." "The constitutional prohibition of 
religious tests as qualifications for of&ce has given 
the United States the leadership among the na- 
tions in dissociating theological opinions and 
political rights." But again we must ask, is 
it otherwise in Germany? What office in Ger- 
many is dependent upon a religious test ? Just as 
the Protestant population of Saxony loves its 
Catholic king, and just as the CathoHc population 
of Southern Baden adores the Protestant Grand 
Duke, so the whole public and political life of 
Germany shows a peaceable intermingling of all 
creeds, exactly as in America. If the Americans, 
to emphasize the contrast with Europe, point to 
the reHgious persecutions of the Jews in Russia, 
we have to consider this as an evidence of race 
antagonism ; and mob violence against other races 
is certainly not unknown in large parts of America. 



180 AMERICAN TRAITS 

On the other hand, the struggle between the Ger- 
man government and the ultramontane Centrist 
party ought never to be misconstrued as religious 
intolerance; it is a strictly political fight for 
power. But religious toleration has not only the 
political aspect, in which all the leading nations 
are to-day on the same footing, but also a social 
aspect ; and it may be doubted whether Germany 
is not superior to America in its willingness to 
accept the social personality without any intermed- 
dling into the particular way of arranging private 
relations to the problems of eternity. There is 
endlessly more personal gossiping about our neigh- 
bor's religion here than in Germany. In smaller 
towns, especially, the social intolerance in rehgious 
matters reaches a degree utterly unknown in con- 
tinental Europe. The American Sunday laws 
would appear to Germans as an intolerable lack 
of religious freedom. There is no doubt that 
even an avowed atheist would find his path much 
freer in Germany than here. 

A third characteristic feature, as is claimed, of 
American civilization has been the successful de- 
velopment of a manhood suffrage. But every 
one knows that the legislative bodies of Germany 
are products of universal suffrage, too, and that 
the local administration is a highly developed self- 
government. In both countries universal suffrage 



AMERICAN DEMOCKACY 181 

is the great school of political education, the 
great vehicle for the feeling of responsibility in 
the masses, the means of disseminating public 
interests ; but in both countries it needs a com- 
plex artificial organization, to be practically man- 
ageable, and above all it needs constitutional 
limitations to avoid the evident dangers and evils. 
All the differences have to do merely with these 
forms of adjustment and means of warding 
off the dangers. The German system insures, 
through the instrumentality of the hereditary 
monarchy, those advantages which the founders 
of the American Kepublic secured through the 
many conservative features of the American form 
of government, where especially the Senate, per- 
haps not as it is, but as it was planned, and the 
prescribed slowness of the governmental proced- 
ures, act as an effective restraint upon popular 
excitements. If democracy be understood as a 
form of government which represents the will 
and energies of the people, the German and the 
American systems are equally democratic, and it is 
wrong to make Hght of German suffrage because 
the highest executive, as representative of the 
national will, is not selected by a majority vote, 
but by the universal, spontaneous loyalty to one 
who stands above parties. On the other hand, it 
is not less unfair when EngUsh authors are pleased 



182 AMERICAN TRAITS 

to call the constitutional the true democracy, and 
the American system a pseudo-democracy only. 
But so much may be said, indeed, — that the Ger- 
man citizen, when he goes to the ballot-box, re- 
ceives the educational influences of universal suf- 
frage more directly than his American colleague. 
There is no machine, there is no " boss," there is 
no two-party system, which often makes the choice 
merely a somewhat demoralizing decision between 
two evils, or demands a vote on issues which make 
no appeal to the personal interests or intelHgence 
of the voter. The large number of parties in 
Germany, on the contrary, lends to the decision a 
much more individual character. 

A fourth point, which is an occasion of pride to 
every American, is " that property has never been 
safer under any form of government." But has 
any one ever owned a pfennig in Germany behind 
which the majesty of the German nation did not 
stand ? Certainly it is not otherwise here, but it 
cannot be denied that Americans themselves 
everywhere reinforce the widespread notion that 
the financially weak man cannot find justice in 
America against the powerful influences of rich 
corporations, a prejudice which has taken much 
stronger form in Europe, and has there spread 
abroad the erroneous opinion that the American 
civil court is a seat of corruption. How much 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 183 

depends in such questions upon the point of view 
is shown by the interesting experience of a large 
association founded in New York by German- 
Americans. This association gives legal aid to 
immigrants, and has in this way been widely ben- 
eficial, but when the society recently celebrated 
an anniversary, the discussions showed that there 
was some difference of opinion as to what they 
were really accomplishing. One party believed 
that their purpose was to aid the immigrant, who, 
by reason of his training in Europe, has not yet 
risen to the height of the American doctrine of 
equal rights for all ; and the other party, on the 
contrary, believed that they were to help the immi- 
grant in obtaining justice, because one who is 
accustomed to its administration in European 
courts will not know how to obtain the " pull " 
that is necessary in the unreliable courts of his 
new home. If we free ourselves from arbitrary 
interpretations of facts and look at the principles, 
we shall be sure of the safety of property on both 
sides of the ocean. 

Is it not a parallel case with the fifth assertion, 
^^ that nowhere have the power and disposition to 
read been so general"? The schooling of the 
nation has been for a hundred years the greatest 
honor of the fatherland, and, while the completely 
illiterate have disappeared in Prussia, it is well 



184 AMERICAN TRAITS 

known how large a percentage of native born 
whites in the United States are illiterate still, in 
how many country districts education is alarm- 
ingly crippled, and how often in city schools the 
accommodation is insufficient. On the surface, 
the case looks better for the sixth point, " that 
nowhere have property and well-being been so 
widely diffused." It is certainly true that the 
lower classes are better off in some parts of the 
United States than in Germany ; America is the 
wealthier country. But there are a few points 
which we must not overlook. On the one hand, 
well-being is a relative affair, more dependent 
upon the changes in social life, whether up or 
down, than upon the given status; and the 
change upwards, the raising of the standard in 
the last twenty years, is much more to be felt in 
the fatherland than here ; moreover, well-being 
there is much less dependent upon wealth than 
in the distinctly commercial atmosphere of this 
country ; and the sociaHstically colored insurance 
laws of Germany diminish the social hardships. 
On the other hand, if the diffusion of American 
wealth is accentuated, can it be denied that the 
extremes are greater here than anywhere else, — 
that the army of the unemployed is swelling while 
the billion-dollar trusts are formed, that the rich- 
est men are richer than any European, while the 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 185 

slums of New York show a misery that is unknown 
in Berlin ? 

A seventh reason for satisfaction with Amer- 
ican democracy is " that no form of government 
ever inspired greater affection and loyalty." But 
can it be truly affirmed that the German nation 
feels less loyalty and affection for its constitu- 
tional monarchy, which does not appeal merely to 
the moral personality, but also to the sesthetic 
imagination ? and does the affection for the form 
of government not fuse with loyalty for the 
highest representative of the nation? And yet, 
while the German is brought up from his child- 
hood to loyal affection for the bearer of the 
crown, almost the half of the American popula- 
tion sees in the White House the man against 
whom their party effort was directed and whom 
they hope to fight again a few years hence. 

There are no fewer grounds for questioning the 
eighth point of this presupposed superiority, " that 
nowhere has governmental power been more ade- 
quate to levy and collect taxes, to raise armies and 
to disband them, to maintain public order, and 
to pay off great public debts." But in what, in 
this respect, does the inferiority of the German 
government appear ? Is it not usually conceded, 
even by the most fervent admirers of the demo- 
cratic system, that the strong side of the European 



186 AMERICAN TRAITS 

governments is their smooth working, due to the 
incomparable preponderance of experts and spe- 
ciaHsts ? It has been asserted, again and again, 
that all the smooth effectiveness of expert gov- 
ernment is morally less valuable than the rough 
working of a democratic machinery. Whether 
that is true is not the question now, but the asser- 
tion implies that at least the technique of govern- 
ment in America cannot be claimed as superior. 

It has been maintained with full right that a 
further ground of the glory of American demo- 
cracy — our ninth — is the way in which people 
of the most various races and nations have been 
absorbed by the vigorous organism of the United 
States. There is no doubt that no other country 
can show a similar achievement, but it is, at the 
same time, a fact that no other country has had 
the opportunity to try its skill in the solution of 
such a problem. The case of the immigrants who 
arrive on our shores with the full intention of 
becoming loyal Americans can scarcely be com- 
pared with that of the Polish or French or Danish 
population, which is unwillingly, and by the 
chance of history, amalgamated with the German 
nation. Those foreign elements which came by 
their own choice to Germany have been as thor- 
oughly assimilated by the monarchy as the Ameri- 
can immigrants by the democracy. America's 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 187 

whole success in that direction is determined by 
its geographical and economical situation, but not 
by its form of government. 

The tenth point — it may be our last — is the 
noble progressiveness of the democratic nation. 
It has been said " that no people have ever wel- 
comed so ardently new machinery and new inven- 
tions generally." But even if we consider pro- 
gress merely from the narrow point of view of 
technique^ it seems that Americans have fallen 
into certain misconceptions. Typical of these 
were the editorials of the press of the whole coun- 
try when the report came that the United States' 
exhibition at the Paris World's Fair won the 
largest number of prizes. The triumph over Ger- 
many was at that time celebrated in all its varia- 
tions. Only later came the commentary. The 
United States had, indeed, the largest number of 
awards, but, as the President of the American 
Manufacturers' Association declared, most of them 
were of secondary value, while the largest num- 
ber of first prizes went to Germany. From the 
121 groups into which the exhibition was divided, 
Germany triumphed in fifty-one, the United 
States in thirty-one, in spite of the fact that the 
number of German exhibits was only 2500, while 
those from the United States numbered 6564. 
On their incomparably broad scientific basis, 



188 AMERICAN TRAITS 

German industries, especially the chemical and 
electrical ones, have made the same rapid progress 
which American industries have enjoyed on the 
basis of greater wealth and commercial enterprise. 
In the same way the introduction of new inven- 
tions into the daily life has been not less charac- 
teristic of Germany. Moreover, progress means 
more than the production and introduction of 
machinery. Can it reailly be said that the genius 
of American democracy is more progressive than 
that of the German nation, if the word be taken 
in its broader sense ? Does not the whole history 
of civilization show that the real decisive progress 
has always come from the great personalities, 
while it is characteristic of democracy to raise the 
average, but to keep down the great man ? The 
democratic masses are progressive in the sense 
that if great men have opened a new way, they 
rush eagerly on; they want more and more of a 
given reform or of a given improvement, but to 
find a method of improvement or reform which is 
really new in principle is never their immediate 
concern ; and yet that alone means progress from 
the standpoint of the world's history. 

But this point in the discussion would lead 
us beyond our goal ; our aim was at first not to 
criticise democracy, but merely to show that not 
every good thing in the United States can be 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 189 

accredited to the existence of democracy. If it 
be taken for granted that the love of peace, 
reHgious toleration, the diffusion of education, 
universal suffrage, the assimilation of foreign 
elements, the safety of property, the love for the 
government, the efficient working of the adminis- 
tration, the wide extension of well-being, and the 
spirit of progress, — that all this because it is pre- 
sent in the United States is a product and char- 
acteristic of democracy, then any critical study of 
the nature of democracy is superfluous. But such 
an assumption would beg the question. We had 
to ask, therefore, at the threshold of our inquiry, 
whether monarchical Germany is inferior in these 
points of distinction, and we have seen that the facts 
speak against such an arbitrary hypothesis. The 
value of democracy cannot be proved by reference 
to qualities which are to the same degree, in some 
respects perhaps even still more strongly, present 
in a so-called aristocracy. It has thus been our 
preparatory task to clear from the way of the dis- 
cussion the popular notion that because America 
is a glorious country under democratic govern- 
ment, therefore every American success must be 
to the glory of democracy. With the same right, 
the same reasons for satisfaction and. pride might 
be construed in Germany as arguments for the 
superiority of the monarchical system. A fair 



190 AMERICAN TRAITS 

discussion will refuse such assistance and "will 
consider the problem as a theoretical one. 

II 

A theoretical discussion of aU sides of democracy 
was not our aim. We set out to answer the ques- 
tion of the American, whether the German ought 
not to prefer democracy. The question involves 
logically a full belief in the merits and advantages 
of democracy ; the answer which has to explain 
why the German negatives the question is thus not 
bound to restate the arguments in favor of demo- 
cratic government; they are considered as well 
known to the questioner, and the other side alone 
is in debate. No one, indeed, can be blind to the 
enormous moral advantages of democracy. It re- 
inforces individual initiative, and through this the 
feeling of responsibility, it secures a high average 
of development, it stimulates every man to an 
equality of effort; and each one of these influences 
is worth being paid for in high sacrifices. Further, 
it makes an absolute change of policy possible, if 
the nation is dissatisfied with the old course ; it 
reinforces the moral truth of the equality of men, 
and it avoids arbitrary and unjust standards of 
comparative valuation ; in short, its ideal aim is 
moral, just, educative, and effective. 

But have these merits not also their defects ? is 



AJVIERICAN DEMOCRACY 191 

the realization of these ideal ends probable or even 
possible ? are not certain other ideals of equal value 
totally neglected ? The German who seeks to in- 
quire thus into the logical meaning and working 
of democracy may, of course, feel from the first 
disinclined to get his information from the United 
States, inasmuch as the experiment was made there 
under exceptionally favorable conditions. There 
was nothing typical in its development, and that 
unique combination of splendid possibiUties might 
have made a noble showing, even if democracy had 
been the most deplorable form of government, and 
if everything had had to be achieved against the 
spirit of democracy. Here, in a land which, by 
its enormous possibiUties, its abundant wealth, its 
freedom from traditions, attracted millions of the 
most energetic men of all nations, their combined 
efforts, not dissipated by the miHtarism which 
results from the geographical conditions of the 
European powers, must be effective in spite of any 
governmental scheme. To learn a lesson in com- 
parative sociology the German, therefore, looks 
more naturally to France, where the periods of 
monarchy were not the least prosperous ones of 
the century ; or to Brazil, where everything turned 
from good to bad when the regime of the old em- 
peror was exchanged for a republic. But even if 
we take all our demonstrations of the practical re- 



192 AMERICAN TRAITS 

suits from the United States^ how much power to 
convince belongs to those principles? 

If we begin with the most seducing tenet of de- 
mocracy, its belief in the equahty of men and their 
equal right to determine the fate of the nation, 
we cannot doubt that the dangerous error of the 
appeal is hidden merely by the glittering gener- 
ality of the term equality. That man is equal in 
so far as every one is equal before God is not a 
new doctrine ; it did not have to wait for the state 
philosophers of the eighteenth century. Every 
man's good will has the same intrinsic, absolute 
value, but this moral truth does not involve any 
consequences as to the nature of man. The ine- 
quality of his strength and beauty, his talents and 
intellect, is more certain than his similarities ; and 
power to determine by a logical decision the wisest 
course of national action is, of course, dependent 
upon his intellect, his insight, and his character ; in 
short, dependent upon the unequal characteristics, 
and without any internal reference to the aspect in 
which man is really equal. The only excuse for 
political equality is thus not that it expresses the 
real equality, but that it is impartial to the different 
kinds of inequality. Every adjustment of pohtical 
rights to the existing inequahty of men is open to 
the reproach of unfairness and arbitrariness. If 
such adjustment were made according to educa- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 193. 

tion, it would be easy to insist that the most edu- 
cated are not necessarily the purest characters ; 
if according to wealth or birth, it could be shown 
that the rich man or the nobleman is not necessa- 
rily the most intelligent and the most educated. 
Every system, in a word, involves some injustice, 
and the only advantage of mechanical equality is 
not that it is freer from injustice, but that it min- 
gles all possible kinds of injustice, — without any 
preference for a special one, indeed, but therefore, 
also, without the possibility of securing at least 
the partial justice of every other system. But 
this small negative merit brings with it an abun- 
dance of defects and dangers, which must be 
clearly felt by every unprejudiced observer of 
American life. A by-product, visible on the sur- 
face, is the empty conventionality which finds its 
ideal in likeness to one's neighbor. The constant 
desire of the democratic American is to avoid an 
individual standpoint, to accept a pattern in his 
social and aesthetic and intellectual life, to dress 
and to read, to travel and to talk like everybody 
else. But the dogma of equality entrains much 
greater evils. One is chronic dilettantism. In 
a democratic community every one can do every- 
thing ; whether he is on a school board or in an 
embassy, in a legislative or in an administrative 
position, his guileless freedom from the influences 



194 AMERICAN TRAITS 

of technical preparation, together with the fact 
that he is a democratic citizen, fits him for the job. 
The need of specialized experts is not felt, and the 
result is an ineffective triviality which repels the 
best men and opens wide the door to dishonesty. 
The career of experts in all functions of public 
activity is the pride of Germany, — where the 
school committeeman or the mayor or the diplo- 
mat chmbs up step by step, and reaches the great- 
est effectiveness by his lifelong speciaHzation. 

But worse even than democratic dilettantism 
IS the lowness of aims which results from the be- 
Hef in equality. If everybody's judgment is of 
equal value, only that is valuable which appeals 
equally to everybody. This is an indirect and yet 
a logically necessary consequence, which shows its 
practical results with an alarming clearness. There 
are only two good things which appeal to every- 
body, because they address the lowest instincts : 
money and physical strength. The result is that 
commercialism and athletics absorb the enerofies 
of men. That does not mean that those who hunt 
for wealth or indulge in sport do so in every case 
because their lower instincts are involved ; but it 
does mean that ends which appeal to the higher 
tendencies only remain ineffective as stimuli for 
the national life. The final outcome must be 
that commercialism, if left alone, would devastate 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 195 

science and art, education and society, law and 
politics ; city government and State legislature 
would go over into the hands of men who cared 
for the little money which was honestly in it, or 
for the much money which was in it dishonestly, 
and the national politics would become tainted by 
the influence of commercial corporations. 

But all this has also another side. Where the 
belief in inequality somewhat discredits those pre- 
miums which appeal to the lower instincts, and 
which are, therefore, desirable for every human 
being, a certain outer organization of the national 
life under the point of view of the aristocratic 
values also becomes necessary. A kind of ideal 
coin must be stamped which can circulate in daily 
practical life like money ; a system of degrees, of 
titles, of honors, of decorations must result which 
give distinction without the power to satisfy the 
lower instincts. They are based on examinations, 
on creditable service, on the judgment of experts, 
on excellence in all those directions where the ap- 
preciation of the masses stops. The consequences 
are clear. The more this ideal coin gains credit, 
the freer its owner becomes from the necessity of 
appealing to the masses and of attracting the atten- 
tion of the half -educated and the quarter-educated : 
his title carries in a condensed form the apprecia- 
tion of the experts. Where the democratic spirit 



196 AMERICAN TRAITS 

makes such coining impossible, man must appeal 
again and again to the masses, who have no mem- 
ory and no refined discrimination. The result is 
not necessarily, as Europeans often wrongly imag- 
ine, a general mob-like vulgarity, but the more civ- 
ilized forms of vulgarity : a bumptious oi^atory, a 
flippant superficiality of style, a lack of aesthetic 
refinement, an underestimation of the serious spe- 
cialist and an overestimation of the unproductive 
popularizer, a constant exploitation of immature 
young men with loud newspaper voices and com- 
plete inability to appreciate the services of older 
men, a triumph of gossip, and a crushing defeat 
of all aims that work against the lazy liking for 
money-making and comfort. On the other hand, 
in an aristocratic country, the existence of a sys- 
tem of honors becomes secondarily a new form 
of appeal, even to the masses. As soon as people 
feel that the distinction of such honors given 
for intrinsic worth outweighs the distinction of 
wealth, the honors themselves become objects of 
desire, even for those to whom the ideal ends in 
themselves do not appeal. The development of 
a system of symbohc honors thus draws the peo- 
ple more and more away from commercialism 
and reinforces the striving towards higher aims 
and ideals. In its last results democracy must 
thus lower the aims of the best to the standard of 



AMERICAN DEMOCKACY 197 

the masses, while aristocracy must push the masses 
with their lower instincts into a striving towards 
higher ends. 

The foregoing stands in close relation to an- 
other feature of pure democracy, — the conspic- 
uous absence of great men. Democratic leaders 
are mostly men who take control of the move- 
ments of the masses, but not men who have the 
inner greatness to lead the masses into new direc- 
tions. This is true for every field, for science and 
literature, just as well as for internal and exter- 
nal politics. The whole system must necessarily 
push into the foreground the skillful manager 
who appeals to the average man, and must keep 
down the really great man, who goes the unpop- 
ular way of new purposes. No one can rise whose 
working cannot be understood in every phase by 
the man behind the plough. And yet it is an 
illusion to imagine that the great men can ever 
be replaced by the high average of the masses. 
A really great thought, a really great inspiration, 
has never come from the diffused intelligence of 
an aggregation or from the zeal of a multitude. 
A parliament is an effective vehicle for acknow- 
ledged ideas, but it never gave rise to a new 
thought ; no philosophical or religious inspiration 
ever came to the world by a majority vote. The 
democratic situation will make great work possi- 



198 AMERICAN TRAITS 

ble merely where this is the result of a gigantic 
cooperation, as demanded by commerce and in- 
dustry, or where individual premiums in the form 
of great wealth stand as temptations, as in the 
case of practical inventions. It is not by chance 
that while American inventions are in line with 
the best inventions of Europe, they are none the 
less for the most part based on scientific discov- 
eries made in Europe. Where cooperation is use- 
less, as in every case of intellectual or sesthetical 
or moral effort, and where no commercial pre- 
mium is offered, a democratic society must remain 
sterile and commonplace, since it has no means of 
stimulating the truly great men in their necessary 
solitude. Where a genius is needed, democracy 
appoints a committee. 

Perhaps still more closely are defect and virtue 
bound together in the case of the democratic 
spirit of individual activity. Every one feels 
himself lawmaker and authority ; the immediate 
result is the tendency to disregard every other 
authority but one's own self. A lack of reve- 
rence pervades the whole community and controls 
the family, the school, the public life. The pert 
American boy who does just what he pleases may 
thus get an early training in democratic politics ; 
but while he wastes the best of the home and of the 
classroom, he gets at the same time the worst pos- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 199 

sible training for the duties of life, all of which 
demand that he do later quite other things than 
those which he likes to do. He will learn too late 
that it is a great thing to command, but a greater 
thing to obey, and that no one can sign early 
enough the declaration of dependence. Where 
no subordination is learned, no self-sacrifice and 
no enthusiasm can be expected, and all institu- 
tions of the land must slowly adjust themselves 
to the much-lamented influence of those who seek 
merely pleasure and success. 

But does not the individual independence in 
democracy involve at least the highest degree 
of liberty? When Lecky, in his famous book, 
coupled the two conceptions, his " Democracy and 
Liberty " meant rather Democracy versus Lib- 
erty. And Democracy remains the defendant 
from whatever standpoint we may consider it. If 
we approach it from the side of social philosophy, 
we must understand that, philosophically, freedom 
means self-determination, but that self-determina- 
tion is characterized not only by the absence of 
outer determining factors, but by the harmoniza- 
tion of all the inner energies. A man is not free, 
in a moral sense, when he is a slave of his passions 
and lower instincts, when he is unable to control 
his impulses by his higher ideas. In the same 
way a social body gains no real liberty simply by 



200 AMERICAN TRAITS 

the overthrowing of external forces, but merely 
by an organization in which the higher elements 
control the lower ones, in which the representa- 
tives of social ideals supersede the forces of selfish 
social instincts and vulgar impulses. A social 
organism will thus be the more free, the more the 
influence of the best men, of the noblest charac- 
ters, and of the best educated personalities sup- 
presses a system of equalization. 

The outcome is the same if we come to the 
question from a practical side. Democracy has, 
first, a necessary tendency to abundant lawmaking 
of a casuistic character, to restrictions and pro- 
hibitions, and a continuous meddling with private 
affairs, inasmuch as that is the only remedy for 
evils at the disposal of such a community and the 
only opportunity for the political representative 
to prove his right to exist, not to mention some 
reasons of less dignity. In democracies, more 
easily than anywhere else, all kinds of protection 
and prohibition interfere with the social and 
economic liberties of the population. Further, 
democracy, when it is not the question of a small 
country, as in ancient Greece or in modern 
Switzerland, but of scores of millions, must neces- 
sarily bring into existence the party machine, and 
finally the party boss. That the machine and 
boss system repels the best men from public life 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 201 

and attracts the cheapest elements to politics, that 
it opens the doors for corruption and selfishness, 
is only one side of the shield; that it destroys 
civil liberty is the other. The rule of the ma- 
chine is more tyrannical and more absolute than 
that of a king. The party rule in America, with 
its methods of nomination, deprives the individual 
of his political powers more completely than any 
aristocratic system, and the despotism of the boss 
easily turns into the tyranny of a group of cap- 
italists. History has shown that this tyranny in 
democracy not seldom takes even the govern- 
mental form of a political dictatorship. That out- 
come is not to be feared in America, but simply 
because the American masses lack the aesthetic 
sense for the beauty of imperial pageantry, that 
sense which fascinates the French when Boulanger 
returns on his black horse from the parade. Demo- 
crats are always incHned to take bad sesthetical 
taste for good moral feehng. 

Is the government of democracy at least an 
effective poHtical instrument? Of course a gov- 
ernment behind which the wealth and strength 
and power of a gigantic nation stand, is effective 
by its mere weight ; but the question is whether 
it gains an additional advantage by the Demo- 
cratic-RepubHcan machinery. Has it, for instance, 
an advantage in political effectiveness over the 



202 AMERICAN TRAITS 

opposite extreme, — the government of Russia? 
The Czar has had certainly no reason to be dis- 
satisfied with the comparative success of his cabi- 
net. To be sure, the democratic nation has this 
great advantage, that the discontented majority 
can break up the poHcy of the day and substitute 
a new one; but in itself it is no improvement 
simply to try the other party, and a state in which 
all efforts at reform must necessarily take the 
shape of seeking to throw overboard the existing 
government, chooses, at least, a very indirect way 
for the improvement of public affairs. In foreign 
politics, too, the government naturally suffers in 
several respects. It cannot have secrets ; it must 
play all the time an open hand. It must make 
continual concessions to public moods and caprices. 
Further, it has not sufficient time at its disposal 
to enter into far-reaching enterprises, as it cannot 
rely on its own continuance. Nor can it, finally, 
awaken in outsiders the confidence which an in- 
dependent continuity of government engenders. 

What do all the foregoing arguments prove ? 
Carthaginem esse delendam f That democracy 
is an evil? Certainly not. We have emphasized 
the great moral and educational and practical 
achievements of the democratic spirit, and no 
intelhgent student of social philosophy can over- 
look the dangerous possibilities and the evil ten- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 203 

dencies of aristocratic society. The principles of 
equality and inequality are, then, both one-sided 
tendencies with immense energies and possibilities 
for good, but encompassed by dangers, both open 
to compromises with human selfishness and to 
demoralization by the masses or by the classes. 
The logical superiority of democracy is out of the 
question, and just as no American wishes to see 
Dewey or Koosevelt established as emperor, so 
no sane German wishes to see a pohtical party 
leader become president of a German repubhc. 
What open-minded men on both sides wish can be 
merely that the unhealthy tendencies which are 
involved in each form of public Hfe may be 
avoided and suppressed ; but, in itself, the one 
state form does not stand higher than the other. 
The form of government under which a nation 
lives — so the educated average German would 
argue — depends upon the conditions of its his- 
toric development : a colony of men who went 
out as pioneers and who separated themselves 
from the mother country could not find unity and 
self-dependence under another form than that of 
the American democracy, while a land which 
hammers out its unity in welding a multitude of 
states, each with a long history under kings and 
princes, needs as its highest symbol the crown 
of an emperor. 



204 AMERICAN TRAITS 

If in these two lands everything were to be 
moulded by the form of the state alone, the final 
outcome would be the greatest possible difference 
in the national life of the two, — one thoroughly 
democratic, the other thoroughly aristocratic. But 
the other possibility is open, that each land sup- 
plements those tendencies which are a necessary 
consequence of its external form of public life 
by compensatory functions which reinforce the 
other side; if democracy counterbalances the 
evils of the crowd by social efforts of the aristo- 
cratic type, and if monarchy overcomes its intrin- 
sic one-sidedness by democratic reforms and im- 
pulses, the differences will be unessential, and 
both countries will show a profound harmony of 
national instincts. Exactly that situation seems 
from day to day more the case of the United 
States and Germany. They become more and 
more alike, and the fact that one is by birth, and 
desires to remain, a monarchy, while the other 
desires to remain a republic, appears secondary and 
unessential. How is that possible ? A hundred 
years ago the question of pohtical government 
moved the world and determined the greatest dif- 
ferences. How has it become so unessential that 
no one to-day seriously considers the problem 
whether democracy or monarchy is the " better " 
form of state? And if the progress of history 



I 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 205 

has abolished that problem, how does it happen 
that the new life in the two lands moves in op- 
posite directions, — that on monarchical ground 
towards greater equality, that on democratic 
ground towards greater aristocracy, and both thus 
towards the same type of social existence, in spite 
of the important individual characteristics and 
differences? 

To understand this whole situation we must 
take a more general point of view, perhaps even 
the most general one which the philosophy of his- 
tory suggests. 

Ill 

If we try to bring order into the manif oldness 
of tendencies which characterize a period, we must 
seek the deeper motives and the underlying ener- 
gies, as the mere classification of outer phenomena 
is easily misleading. For a newspaper editorial it 
may do, for instance, to call the nineteenth cen- 
tury the period of natural science, but the super- 
ficiality of such an appellation becomes clear to 
every one who examines more carefully the first 
half of the century, or, better, considers the pro- 
gress of natural science and technique in periods 
that have gone before. When Schiller, one hun- 
dred years ago, praised the man of the eighteenth 
century, he called him the man who had mastered 



206 AMERICAN TRAITS 

nature, and who was fascinated by the victory 
over the energies of nature. We cannot under- 
stand the times better if we choose another outer 
mark for the characterization of the time ; we 
must proceed from external to internal factors. 
It is so everywhere in scientific classifications. 
The child divides the animals into those of the 
air and those of the water, those of the air into 
such as fly and such as do not fly. The zoologist 
neglects such external resemblances, and divides 
them into those with a backbone and those with- 
out a backbone ; and among the vertebrates, he 
distinguishes the mammals from the non-mammals, 
and so his classification separates much that seems 
to belong together. If we seek such principles 
of internal division for the phenomena of civiliza- 
tion, we find only one which is deep enough to 
allow us to comprehend the true connections : it 
is the division into realism and idealism. I know 
that some realist would at once be inclined here 
to think of the zoological classes we have just 
mentioned, and to consider the reahsts as beings 
with, and the idealists as beings without, a back- 
bone. But we have at first not to praise and not 
to blame, but simply to separate the different types 
of human interests. 

The reahst seeks reality in objects, the idealist 
seeks it in ideas, The realist considers, therefore, 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 207 

that which is as final, and the idealist that which 
ought to be. The realist, therefore, relies on 
perception, the idealist on feeling. The one seeks 
to understand the world, the other to ennoble the 
world. The one works with the understanding, 
the other by means of inspiration. Realism, there- 
fore, urges on to science, idealism to philosophy 
and religion ; and in the scientific realm the real- 
ist works inductively, the ideahst deductively: 
the realist prefers natural science, the ideahst his- 
torical science. The reahst emphasizes technique, 
tries to master nature, and produces material for 
exchange ; the ideahst finds his mission in art, 
masters nature by the inner liberation of his mind, 
and creates symbols. In art the reahst is natural- 
ist, the ideahst comes in the garb of romanticism, 
of symbolism, or classicism. The realist seeks the 
essence of human Hfe in pleasure and pain, the 
idealist in man's will. Therefore morality is, for 
the realist, based on utihty : for the ideahst, on 
the idea of good. For one the greatest happiness 
of the greatest number is the criterion, for the 
other the idea of duty, independent of happiness 
and majorities. As all men have equal capacities 
for pleasure and pain, the reahst considers all men 
equal. The reahst thus beheves in the masses, 
the idealist in the hero and the genius. The real- 
ist is, therefore, democratic, the ideahst aristo- 



208 AMERICAN TRAITS 

cratic : the realist is cosmopolitan and humani- 
tarian, the idealist is national and imperialistic ; 
the realist seeks his goal in liberty, the idealist in 
justice. 

Eealism and Idealism are the two poles of man- 
kind, and just as the realism of the man and the 
ideahsm of the woman supplement each other in 
every noble home, so these two great tendencies 
have always cooperated in the history of the peo- 
ples. We have only to look to the two greatest 
men of ancient Greece, the two men who con- 
trolled the thought of more than a thousand years, 
Plato and Aristotle, to feel at once the typical ex- 
pression of the two great tendencies. "Plato," 
says Goethe, " penetrates the world to fill it with 
his own ideals ; he does not wish to analyze the 
world, but to bring it into harmony with the good 
and the true and the beautiful. Aristotle, how- 
ever, approaches the world Hke a master builder ; 
he examines the ground and brings material to- 
gether and arranges it to build up his solid pyra- 
mid." As long as men will take a systematic 
view of the world and of human life, it will be 
ultimately Platonic or Aristotelian. 

Such a cooperation of the two tendencies does 
not mean simply their fusion, but rather their al- 
ternation ; and when they work together, — that 
is, when they reach a compromise in a special case, 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 209 

— a state of equilibrium ensues, and the problem 
is then relatively solved. But so long as there is 
to be development, the one or the other must 
prevail. As we cannot move towards the right 
and towards the left at the same time, so the social 
mind cannot turn, at the same time, to national- 
ism and cosmopolitanism, to naturalistic and to 
symbolistic art, to inductive and to philosophic 
science, to atheism and to religion. And such 
an alternation is the necessary outcome of the 
mental structure : every psychic movement has a 
tendency to go to an extreme, and the extreme 
has a tendency to produce a reaction in the oppo- 
site direction, which must itself go to the extreme 
again. If the tendencies alternate, it is clear that 
one alone does not mean progress and the other 
regress; both are indispensable to development, 
and it is absurd to imagine that the realistic 
movement, for example, is alone progressive and 
the idealistic energy a hindrance to civilization. 
Whoever stands, in the battle of the day, on one 
side must see the enemy on the other side ; but 
from the standpoint of social philosophy, both 
energies, reahsm and idealism, are equally impor- 
tant and valuable. It is unfair to imply that 
reahsm is selfish and idealism unselfish : the utili- 
tarian morality of the realist is not less unselfish 
than the intuitional morality of the ideahst ; real- 



210 AMERICAN TRAITS 

ism is not in its nature egoistic, just as idealism || 
is not unpractical. And both sides can be equally 
inhuman and base. It was realism which sharp- 
ened the blade of the guillotine, and idealism 
which set fire to the funeral piles of the Middle 
Ages ; it was realism which at times brought the 
mill laborers to the misery of starvation, and ideal- 
ism which shot down the helpless lower races in 
the dark countries. Great and small men, clever 
and stupid men, noble and base men, have been 
always on either side. 

If this alternation characterizes the progress of 
civilization, it is further clear that the movement 
cannot be a simple pendulum movement. The 
pendulum always swings again to the same point ; 
civihzation, on the other hand, moves forward. 
If civihzation is realistic, then idealistic, then 
realistic again, it is not the same realism for a 
second time. The past is not simply repeated ; 
the new movement arises from the same moral 
energies, but the whole foregoing development is 
included in the new position. Every phase of 
this gigantic counterplay brings certain problems 
to rest and fulfillment by a compromise, and new 
problems come to the front. Eealism takes up 
one problem and carries its one-sided solution to 
an extreme ; then awakes the idealistic counter- 
movement and becomes powerful. Idealism takes 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 211 

up new impulses and reinforces them till a real- 
istic counter-movement begins ; but the first pro- 
blem, since both sides have fought for it and have 
defended their extreme positions, comes in the 
mean time to a compromise, and thus ceases to be 
a problem. It is thus less a pendulum movement 
than a spiral movement. It is as if we should 
climb up a tower by a spiral staircase ; we are 
then looking from the windows of the tower, now 
to the north and now to the south, but we never 
look twice through the same window : whenever 
the stair brings us back to the same side, the 
window lies higher, the view has become more 
extended. 

Such alternations took centuries in the slow 
rhythm of earlier civilization, but the changes 
have come more and more swiftly, and in the last 
hundred years they have followed each other with 
the rapidity of generations, in so far as the great 
fundamental movements of a world-civilization 
are in question. Of course, whenever one wave 
begins to swell, it does not mean that the after- 
effects of the foregoing wave have disappeared ; 
while one world-tendency is at its maximum, the 
movement of the last, and perhaps even of that 
before the last, may still be felt, and the slow be- 
ginning of the next wave may already be percep- 
tible to the sensitive mind. And, secondly, this 



212 AMERICAN TRAITS 

great fundamental up and down of realism and 
idealism in the world's civilization does not exclude 
the possibility that the same change of realistic 
and idealistic energies may continue in narrower 
circles, in local realms, in special problems, inde- 
pendently of the great world-movements ; a local 
realistic movement may thus coincide with a gen- 
eral realistic tendency, and thus reinforce it, or 
may fall together with a general idealistic wave, 
and thus inhibit it, or limit it to certain regions. 

This change from generation to generation is 
reflected very clearly in the alternating phases 
of philosophical thought. The middle of the 
eighteenth century was controlled by a realistic 
view of the world : experience and analysis were 
the methods — sensualism, skepticism, materialism 
were the results ; the spirits of Locke and Hume, 
of the French encyclopaedists and Voltaire, were 
in the foreground. The reaction came with the 
German idealism of the end of the eighteenth 
century ; Kant emphasizes the " ought " as 
against the " is," and the idealistic philosophy, in 
its increasing energy from Kant to Fichte, to 
Schelling, and finally to Hegel, conquers the phi- 
losophical world. Hegelianism represents the ex- 
treme which demands a realistic reaction ; before 
the middle of the nineteenth century is reached, 
idealism lies again in the dust, a new realism 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 213 

triumplis, positivism and materialism push to the 
foreground, Comte and Spencer become the spokes- 
men of an unphilosophic age, and natural science, 
with Darwin and Helmholtz as leaders, absorbs 
the philosophizing interest of the time. But be- 
fore the nineteenth century came to an end, the 
situation changed once more : for about ten years 
philosophy has been again on the idealistic track. 
While realistic philosophy ran to its extreme, from 
materialism to psychologism and sociologism, a 
serious idealistic reaction began in the midst of 
empirical scientists who had despised philosophy 
for forty years. The leading thinkers, the world 
over, plunged again into epistemological inquiries, 
Kant and Fichte were revived, and an ethical vol- 
untarism grew from year to year. The situation 
of the world's scholarship of to-day shows decid- 
edly in every line the philosophical, idealistic 
trend, notwithstanding that it has found so far 
no overwhelming classic expression : the wave is 
only swelling to-day, its highest point may be ten 
or twenty years hence. This up and down of real- 
ism and idealism in philosophical thought is not a 
chance feature, nor even a by-product of civiliza- 
tion, but the clearest expression, and perhaps most 
central factor, of the world's development through- 
out that period. The French philosophy of the 
eighteenth century cannot be separated from the 



214 AMERICAN TRAITS 

French Kevolution or from the American Decla- 
ration of Independence. The anti-idealistic move- 
ment of the post-Hegelian time, with its overesti- 
mation of the natural sciences, cannot be separated 
from the development of modern industry and 
modern technique. And thus in every way the 
philosophical movements were both the moving 
powers and the indicators of the whole rhythm of 
civilization. The Western civilization, as a whole, 
shows, indeed, a realistic character in the second 
half of the eighteenth century, an idealistic wave 
in the first third of the nineteenth, a new realism 
since the middle of it, and the beginning of a 
new idealism near the close of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. We might just as well have followed it in 
the movements of art and literature. Can it be 
doubted that the realistic period of naturalism in 
art is over, and that, since the days of the new 
symboHsm, a young idealism is passing through 
the art exhibitions of all countries ? or that the 
period of Zola's realism is a thing of the past, and 
that Ibsen and Tolstoy and Hauptmann and Kip- 
ling approach, from very different quarters, the 
realm of idealism ? or can we overlook the corre- 
sponding alternation between realistic cosmopoli- 
tanism and idealistic nationalism, and, nearly con- 
nected therewith, the alternating phases of human 
belief in the equality and in the inequality of 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 215 

men? The former breaks the chains of the 
slaves, the latter takes up the burden of the 
white man. Our own period, as it presses towards 
philosophy and religion in its thought and towards 
idealism in its art, must be nationaHstic and ex- 
pansionistic. 

But the strongest feature of this movement of 
the last hundred and fifty years has not been 
pointed out so far. The realism of the eighteenth 
century was first of all democratic, the reaction in 
the nineteenth was necessarily aristocratic, mon- 
archic, imperialistic : the outcome was a compro- 
mise, for Europe the constitutional monarchy ; 
and by this compromise, as always happens, the 
movement itself came to an end, the problem 
ceased to exist. In the second half of the nine- 
teenth century the form of political government 
was no longer a question which moved peoples. 
How far otherwise was it considered in the eigh- 
teenth, and how narrowly connected with all the 
other phases of the realistic movement, with its 
philosophy and its religion, its literature and its 
social life ! It was the great period of enlight- 
enment, which worked with sober clearness, with 
skeptical understanding, with humanitarian com- 
mon-sense. Such a period must have one aim 
above all, not to allow any illusions. And as the 
foregoing idealistic period had left a world full of 



216 AMERICAN TRAITS 

illusions and symbols of a religious and historical 
character, the chief energy of the time had to be- 
come destructive, and to turn against the authority 
of the church and of the state : equality and lib- 
erty sounded in all the streets. It was a period 
rich in its inheritance for the following century, 
full of humanitarian and civil impulses, and yet it 
was narrow and Philistine, as is every enlighten- 
ment of the understanding alone : it was anti-his- 
torical, anti-religious, anti-artistic, with no imagina- 
tion, no emotion, no great historical consciousness ; 
and the idealistic reaction was unavoidable. The 
time of Hegel and Goethe and Beethoven had to 
be the time of Napoleon and of Prussia's war for 
its national independence ; it was the time when 
romanticism and Gothic art awoke again, and 
mankind thought more of the genius than of the 
masses. The fusion of these two great antago- 
nistic tendencies eliminated this problem. 

When the great reaction against romanticism 
came, it could not again be a return to the stand- 
point of the eighteenth century, but it brought 
new problems forward as the old ones had reached 
a compromise. The new problems came from the 
new realism, which meant natural science, modern 
industry and commerce and transport and medi- 
cine. But here, again, the movement had to work 
itself to an end, to reach an extreme which de- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 217 

mands reaction. We stand in the middle of it. 
The new discoveries are no longer solutions o£ 
life-problems, but luxuries ; the phonograph is 
not what the telegraph was. Above all, modern 
industry brought up the question of modern labor, 
the social conscience awoke, a new type of man, 
the mill laborer, stood before the world ; and man- 
kind recognized that he was helpless, and must 
become daily more helpless, in the presence of 
combined capital. The idealistic reaction began, 
the social question absorbed the thinking world, 
and thus the great antagonism of energies, of the 
same mental energies which fought a hundred 
years ago over the problems of state form, are 
concentrated to-day on the problems of the social 
question. The idealistic reaction in which we live 
will grow to a point where a compromise will be 
reached, and the social problem will then become 
as obsolete and indifferent as the political problem 
of monarchy or republic is to-day ; and while the 
alternation of ideahsm and realism will go on, 
new and ever new problems will offer themselves 
as the results of the new fields which are opened 
up by these antagonistic energies. 



218 AMERICAN TRAITS 

IV 

"We have answered our first question, bow it 
has come about that the question of monarchy or 
republic has been laid on the table in the congress 
of nations ; but we have not answered the second 
question, why the republic of America and the 
monarchy of Germany approach each other by 
a movement in opposite directions, — the Uni- 
ted States moving towards aristocracy, Germany 
towards democracy. But the foregoing reduction 
of all human efforts to the alternation of realistic 
and idealistic energies contains, also, the explana- 
tion of this second phenomenon. We emphasized 
from the first that the great progress of general 
civilization of the whole Western world is not the 
only illustration of that counterplay of energies : 
the world-movements are accompanied by local 
movements of far-reaching independence. The 
French Revolution, Darwinism, electro-technique, 
and the labor question are world-movements which 
cannot be localized ; but other waves are Hmited 
by the boundaries of a nation, others even by the 
walls of a town or of a set or of a group : any 
social unit may have its independent alternation of 
realistic and idealistic energies. While the general 
world-movements show to-day the ebbing of a great 
realistic wave, which was at flood tide twenty years 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 219 

ago, and the slow upward swelling of an idealistic 
wave, which has not yet broken, there is a local 
realistic democratic movement just now sweeping 
over Germany and an idealistic tendency over the 
United States. Both are determined by local con- 
ditions, but both work towards a surprising simi- 
larity of the two forms of national life, inasmuch 
as they are necessarily diminishing those differ- 
ences which resulted from the different forms of 
the historical constitution. 

It may sound paradoxical, and yet it can hardly 
be doubted that, within a certain limit, it is on 
both sides the same cause which has had an oppo- 
site effect. It is the accumulation of wealth which 
creates the aristocratic movement in America and 
which spreads a democratic spirit over Germany. 
The strenuous pioneer Hfe, where wealth begins 
merely in the first generation, has no room for 
class discrimination and for aristocratic fashion, 
culture, art, and taste ; on the other side, in the 
society in which the nobleman is the rich land- 
owner and high officer and state official, with all 
the power in his traditional rights, while the pop- 
ulation is poor, and therefore powerless, there is 
no chance for democratic ideas. But if inherited 
wealth and a leisure class grow up on the one side 
of the ocean, and if commerce and industry bring 
wealth to the middle classes on the other side, 
then the time for a change has come. 



220 AMERICAN TRAITS 

Two recent novels, one American and the other 
German, throw light on the contrasts of the situa- 
tion. " In this country we are all free and equal/' 
says Selma in Kobert Grant's " Unleavened 
Bread/' and Flossie retorts, " Yes, there is some- 
thing of the sort in the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, but that was put in as a bluff to console 
salesladies. . . . People here are either in society 
or out of it, and society itself is divided into sets. 
There 's the conservative aristocratic set, the smart 
rapid set, the set which has not much money, but 
has Knickerbocker or other highly respectable an- 
cestors, the new millionaire set, the literary set, the 
intellectual philanthropic set, and so on. . . . 
Most of the people in these different sets are 
somebodies because either their grandfathers or 
they have done something well — better than other 
people — and made money as a consequence. And 
when a family has made money or won distinction 
by its brains, and then has brushed its teeth twice 
a day for two generations, the members of it, 
even though duU, are entitled to respect, don't 
you think so ? " 

And now as a contrast to Grant's ironical 
sketch, so full of truth, let me quote the splendid 
novel of Georg von Ompteda, — " Eysen." It is 
the life portrait of the family von Eysen, an old 
noble family which has belonged for centuries to 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 221 

the aristocratic set which has controlled social life 
by holding the high positions in state and army 
and owning the great country estates. It now 
sees that a new time is coming, and feels that the 
land is passing into the hands of the new mer- 
chants and bankers and industrials and that 
the higher standard of the middle classes, with 
their hard work and intellectual energy, is bring- 
ing them more and more to power and leadership. 
The General von Eysen is conscious that he has 
overcome his old prejudices : he has given per- 
mission to his only son to become neither officer 
nor state official, but engineer ; and at a reunion 
in which he meets the younger members of his 
family he says in his toast : " Above all — you 
must work ; who does not work, must sink. Be 
everywhere — not only where we could be found 
in the past — on our own ground, in the state 
service, in the army. . . . We Hve in a new time 
and a new time demands new conditions; give 
honor to the tradition, but do not become its 
slaves. If you look only backward to the history 
of the past, you will lose your freedom. . . . No, 
my young relatives, we old families do not want 
to be submerged. Go into art, into science and 
medicine, sit on the merchant's stool, guide your 
ships into foreign seas for the honor and advan- 
tage of the German name ; enter life not only as 



222 AMERICAN TRAITS 

state officers, but as lawyers, or as architects; 
wherever in the world money is to be gained by 
the exertion of commerce and industry, go and 
take part ; money in the right hand gives free- 
dom." 

Yes, a new time has come for Germany; in 
thirty years of undisturbed peace it has grown 
rich, it has changed from an agricultural country 
into an industrial country, the standard of life 
has been raised with an undreamed of rapidity, 
the horizon has been widened, the new industry 
has pushed trade over the ocean, a colonial system 
has grown up, and all has had only one effect in 
common, — the rise of the democratic spirit in 
the noblest meaning of the word. It has not 
taken anything from the aristocratic power of the 
empire, has not touched all the noble achieve- 
ments of an aristocratic army and state service, 
has even reinforced the German's love for his king 
and his princes ; and yet, as General von Eysen 
said, the new time has come. The symptoms are 
felt wherever we turn. The raising of the social 
level of the business man, the merchant, and the 
industrial man, together with the sinking of the 
social level of the landowner, is certainly one of 
the most prominent features. The power which 
the great representatives of industry and com- 
merce and banking and the market have to-day 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 223 

in the state organism of Germany could not have 
been dreamt of twenty years ago, and the num- 
ber of high officials who seek business positions 
grows rapidly. There is a certain analogy in the 
steady raising of the practical professions, that of 
the engineer and the scientist, in comparison with 
the Hterary professions ; the entire education is 
being turned, and not least through the Emper- 
or's influence, in the direction of practical, tech- 
nical achievements as over against the classic 
traditions. It is the same principle which eman- 
cipates the woman, a movement which, after a 
long time of waiting, to-day perhaps overhastens 
its progress : the democratic desire for equality 
must demand the same rights for women. But 
the principle of emancipation applied to the busi- 
ness world, the practical professions, the women, 
cannot be limited to the middle classes; the same 
tendency must help the lower classes also. No- 
where, perhaps, does the " new time " appear more 
clearly. The social-democratic party, which was, 
even ten years ago, considered and suppressed as 
an enemy of the state, becomes daily more and 
more a cooperating member of the social organism, 
while the material fate of the laborer is protected 
by the state socialism, which has become law. 
And, above all, the intellectual and sesthetic inter- 
ests of the masses are growing with the higher 



224 AMERICAN TRAITS 

standard of the whole population* The reading 
of papers, the formation of clubs and societies, 
discussions and lectures, reach wider and wider 
circles, while rich men begin, in growing measure, 
to devote large gifts to public benefits. Add 
thereto the new enthusiasm for the sea, for naval 
affairs, for foreign lands beyond the ocean, a 
widening of the horizon which necessarily has a 
democratic tendency, and which greatly reinforces 
the spirit of independence and individual activity ; 
add the immense development of technique, of 
transportation, of means of communication, all 
thoroughly democratic factors, since they put men 
more on an equal footing and bring progress 
within the reach of every one ; add the whole 
increase of the yearly saving, which means better 
food and better houses, health and cleanliness and 
enjoyment, — and if we sought to compress all 
into one word, we might say, Germany has be- 
come in the last ten years Americanized. The 
thoroughly aristocratic nation, with all its appre- 
ciation for the historical forces and symbols, for 
arts and education, for the leadership of the edu- 
cated, and for the acknowledgment of authority, 
has added to itself since the coming of the new 
time the individual activity and the equality of 
the ideal democracy. 

And America ? Is Flossie right, — has equaUty 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 225 

become only a bluff for the consolation of sales- 
ladies ? Certainly not ! Democracy is still to-day 
the rock on which the United States is built, and 
will remain so, exactly as Germany in its deepest 
structure will remain monarchical ; and yet, if it 
is true that Germany becomes democratic, in a 
thousand respects it is still more true that Amer- 
ica becomes aristocratic : a new time has come for 
America, too. Of course I do not have in mind 
here those pseudo-aristocratic and pseudo-mon- 
archic tendencies which work against the demo- 
cratic institutions by dishonest means and intol- 
erable abuses : bossism is merely the caricature of 
aristocracy ; and while it is true that Quay and 
Croker and their Hkes are tyrants without a con- 
stitutional background, whose whims lead men on 
to fortune or destroy them, this tyranny is the 
outgrowth of democracy and not at all the legacy 
of aristocratic impulses. 

But even when we turn to the really aristocra- 
tic symptoms of national life, the question is not 
whether we welcome or deprecate them ; we are 
interested merely in the question whether the phe- 
nomena exist. Thus it cannot be our task here 
to inquire whether the United States is wise or 
unwise in its policy of aggressive expansion, 
whether it would be better to remain loyal to the 
principles of the past, which reduced the chances 



€^. 



226 AMERICAN TRAITS 

of friction with other nations, and thus saved to 
the land the burdens of miHtarism, or whether 
the progress of the country demands that new 
responsibihties be courageously faced. For us it 
is sufficient that imperialism is a symptom of the 
aristocratic attitude towards man, and that impe- 
rialism is the creed of the country. Imperiahsm 
means the belief in the inequality of men, which, 
as we emphasized from the beginning, follows the 
logic of idealism. It is true that only one of the 
two great parties stood for the imperialistic pohcy 
in the last presidential election ; but the social psy- 
chologist cannot doubt that the Democrats were 
anti-imperialistic only because the Republicans had 
chosen otherwise beforehand ; while the Demo- 
cratic masses, before the campaign had hammered 
the issue into their minds, were not less carried 
away by the Kipling mood than the other half 
of the nation. But it was not even necessary to 
wait till the Philippine issue was brought before 
the American consciousness. The suppression 
of the Chinese in California, the barriers erected 
against the undesirable types of immigrants from 
Europe, above all, the adroit laws to deprive the 
negro of his vote, — all speak the same language, 
all demonstrate the same way of feeling : the 
aristocratic morality of a powerful and noble 
nation, what Nietzsche called the morals of mas- 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 227 

ters — so different from the democratic morals of 
slaves, who try to make the world believe that all 
men are equal. 

But does this undemocratic spirit turn against 
the outsider only ? Where is the equaUty in the 
inner life of America ? Of course it is true that 
we have public schools where all are equal ; the 
only difficulty is that they are not in use. Yes, 
there is no doubt that we are fast approaching a 
state where nobody in a city sends his children to 
the public schools when his means allow him to 
pay for the instruction of a private school. " Tout 
comme chez nous ! " The whole educational sys- 
tem is rapidly becoming aristocratic. This case 
is similar to that of travel by rail. Americans 
who go to Europe like to ridicule the class differ- 
ences in the European trains and boast that Ameri- 
can railroads have only one class ; but on inquiry 
it appears that it is hard to find any one of your 
acquaintance who travels in America, from one 
large city to another, without carefully avoiding 
that single class by sitting in the parlor car. And 
this exclusiveness of the passenger reflects the 
character of society. The plan after which the 
smart set, and not in New York and Newport 
alone, celebrates its festivities and weds its brides 
is not only the pattern of fashion and luxury, but 
a conscious imitation of aristocracy. A typical 



228 AMERICAN TRAITS 

expression is found in the immense growth of the 
pedigree craze. The marriages of American heir- 
esses with European fortune hunters of the nobil- 
ity seem to me un-American, and thus not typical : 
it is the fancy of individuals and not a symptom 
of national life. But the genealogical passion, 
" the pedigree spleen/' grows out of the best ma- 
terial of the nation, and yet it is thoroughly anti- 
democratic. If a single family of Connecticut 
needs three volumes of 2740 quarto pages to 
print its own history; if the Daughters of the 
Revolution have 27,000 members ; if the genea- 
logical societies like the Colonial Dames, the 
Daughters of the Holland Dames, the Mayflower 
Descendants, and so on, multiply with every year, 
— the aristocratic undercurrent cannot be doubted. 
It is thus not by chance that the old Southern 
aristocracy just now begins to become somewhat 
reconciled : public life begins to move more and 
more in their direction. 

And all this is reflected in the public Hf e. We 
know the simpHcity, according to the tradition at 
least, with which that President of the past went 
on horseback alone to the Capitol to take the oath 
of of&ce, and tied his horse to the post ; we know 
the military pageantry which accompanied the 
last presidential inauguration. And this aristo- 
cratic desire for the outer symbolic decoration 



I 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 229 

percolates through all layers of society, down to 
the car conductor and the elevator boy, who are 
proud of their distinguishing uniform, while, only 
a short time ago, as I am informed, a free Amer- 
ican still objected to wearing any uniform in 
civil life. The tendency to develop more refined 
and polished manners belongs necessarily to the 
change ; the spitting and chewing decrease from 
year to year, and the men who put their feet on 
the table and the women who rock while they 
are talking become rarer specimens. 

But these are matters of external Hfe. It is 
the inner vitality in which the really important 
changes are felt, changes which are essentially 
beyond difference of opinion, changes which can- 
not be disposed of as snobbish, and which none 
the less are decidedly aristocratic. Here belongs 
the steadily increasing influence of college-bred 
men in public life; the fact itself has recently 
been often demonstrated with full statistics, and 
its meaning is clear : the men of superior education 
are brought to that superior position which aris- 
tocracy willingly offers them, and which demo- 
cracy finally cannot deny them, in spite of the 
flagrant inconsistency of the act. Parallel with 
this movement there necessarily goes a twofold 
development : the growth of the feeling of public 
duties and responsibilities and the substitution 



230 AMERICAN TRAITS 

of aesthetic and intellectual ideals for those of a 
merely commercial character. 

There will^ of course, always be pessimists who 
lament that the present is worse than the past ; 
and for editorials with a point against Tammany 
or against Wall Street, it is the right thing to 
begin by declaiming that politics has reached its 
lowest moral ebb, or that the whole Hfe of the 
land is sacrificed to commercialism. This may be 
effective, but it is not true. The stronger current 
o£ the nation is at present setting in the opposite 
direction. The number of men who, unselfishly 
and with high ideals, serve the community in a 
thousand forms is undoubtedly increasing every 
day. The Roosevelt type is increasing in politics, 
but far more outside of politics. If the feeling 
of duty led merely to financial bequests, it ought 
not to count for too much in a country in which 
— compared with Germany, for instance — the 
rich men pay so small a tax ; but those men should 
count who give their time and effort, their intel- 
lect and honesty, to public trusts. "Noblesse 
oblige " is daily more felt ; but it presupposes, of 
course, the " noblesse," the aristocracy. That the 
new time means a new life for art and science 
must impress every one. The rapid growth of 
our graduate schools, with their goals far beyond 
the reach of the college, demands an understand- 



AMERICAN DEMOCKACY 231 

ing of the value of pure knowledge, which offers it- 
self at first only as a luxury of the leisure classes : 
truth for truth's sake belongs to an aristocratic 
society. And since the days of the Chicago 
Fair and the Washington and Boston libraries, 
the wave of American art is swelling. All the 
conditions are surely favorable to it. History 
has always shown that art comes to fullest flower 
whenever wealth is abundant, so that a leisure 
class may exist, and when, at the same time, a 
characteristic national development arises. The 
leisure class is as yet made up for the most part 
of women, but the more wealth comes into the 
second and third generation, the more men are 
joining their ranks. And the more the new pol- 
itics brings the country into relations with other 
nations, the more it becomes conscious of the spe- 
cific national characteristics of its civiHzation. 
This beautifying impulse, which is so strictly an- 
tagonistic to the utilitarian aspect of democracy, 
brightens the whole country. Ten years ago the 
railroads were no less well equipped, but the rail- 
road stations were painful to a European eye ; the 
new stations built in the last ten years in the lead- 
ing cities reflect the whole development of a na- 
tion which is passing through an aristocratic period. 
Not the narrowness of the farmer, but the aesthetic 
taste of the educated controls the outer forms of 



232 AMERICAN TRAITS 

public life, and the marble of the public halls 
teaches the masses that they must refine their 
manners. Still more evident is a growing refine- 
ment in the industrial arts and in the decoration 
of the home. Democratic wealth admires silver- 
ware and jewelry; aristocratic life does not care 
for the value of the material, but appreciates the 
form, the idea, the soul : Tiffany glass and Rook- 
wood pottery would have been impossible in 
America twenty years ago. 

One other position democracy begins slowly, too 
slowly, to surrender ; the democratic belief that 
everybody can do everything, if he only will, is 
slowly fading, and the public, not less than every 
corporation, demands expert talent for its busi- 
ness, with the necessary changes on all sides. 
It demands, first of all, civil service reform and a 
pension system. The pension system, outside of 
the army, is undemocratic, and thus foreign to the 
United States till recent years ; it is one of the 
greatest blessings of the aristocratic wave that it 
carries the pension system into the most different 
fields of life, and thus creates the repose of faith- 
ful service which knows itself protected and is 
not obliged to push itself constantly before the 
attention of the masses. Even in the highest 
classes of service, like university work, the pension 
idea is only five years old. On the other hand. 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 233 

there are symptoms that the salary question, also, 
in all walks of public Hfe, will be settled in the 
near future. To-day the judges of the Supreme 
Court, the Vice-President, the members of the 
Cabinet, and correspondingly all the lower offi- 
cials, are paid according to the naive democratic 
idea that the salary must be large enough so that 
some one who is ready to take the job can be 
found for it. This farmer's economy is disap- 
pearing, and the public is learning an aristocratic 
lesson from the big trusts and corporations. This 
undemocratic behef in the authority of the ex- 
pert brings the regular army steadily forward in 
pubHc estimation, while the volunteers are losing 
ground. The demand for a diplomatic career, 
for a systematic schooling for consular and diplo- 
matic service, daily becomes louder ; the time for 
democratic dilettantism has gone ; since America 
has become a world-power, it has too much to 
lose. The government cannot play any longer 
with a hand always open to the criticism of every 
editorial writer, and its diplomats need the pre- 
paration of a lifetime ; in short, America daily 
becomes more like the others, and among the 
'' others " especially like Germany, where the be- 
lief in the superiority of expert work and expert 
judgment has found its fullest development and 
realization. 



234 AMERICAN TRAITS 

Germany is Americanizing and America is Ger- 
manizing, and nothing at this stage can stop the 
further development in that direction ; it has be- 
come necessary as an outlet for energies which 
were artificially kept down by aristocracy in Ger- 
many and by democracy in America. Only since 
these two national movements have supplemented 
the existing tendencies, are both countries fully 
prepared for their roles as leaders on the globe. 
Germany will remain a monarchy, America a re- 
public and democracy in its entire political struc- 
ture, and yet this political difference will be daily 
less felt, because, as we have seen, the pohtical 
questions of the state forms have lost their charac- 
ter as problems. They have not lost their import- 
ance, but they have, like morality, become a matter 
of course, which is not under discussion, and which 
must be understood from historical conditions ; 
the constitutional difference no longer means any 
difference of opinion. The "problem" has be- 
come a social one, and it is just this field in which, 
as we have seen, the development of the last years 
has brought about in both countries the same re- 
sult. The same end-point, a complete harmoni- 
zation of aristocratic and democratic energies, has 
been reached from two opposite starting points. 
There is no third country for which that is equally 
true. It points to the profound similarity between 



AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 235 

the Americans and the Germans^ a similarity which 
was a long time hidden by the dissimilarity of occu- 
pations. Now, however, that the pioneer period 
of America is over and that Germany is entering 
into the world-market, the time has come when 
the deep harmony of their natures can fully show 
itself. This kinship of character is the best secu- 
rity for a future of lasting peace, not free from 
competition and rivalry in all fields of commerce 
and industry, of science and art, of culture and 
ideals, but free from animosity and ill will. What- 
ever fate may bring, the present conjunction of 
the stars would seem to betoken that Americans 
and Germans will never again forget that they 
belong together. 



Electrotyped a^id printed by H. O. Houghton 6r» Co, 
Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A. 



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